Polish Encounters, Russian Identity (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies)

Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, general editors

Polish Encounters, Russian Identity Edited by David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross

Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] ∫ 2005 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Polish encounters, Russian identity / edited by David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross. p. cm. — (Indiana-Michigan series in Russian and East European studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34588-X (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21771-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Poland—Relations—Russia. 2. Russia—Relations—Poland. 3. Nationalism—Russia—History. 4. Polish question. I. Ransel, David L. II. Shallcross, Bozena. III. Series. DK4185.R9P637 2005 303.48%2470438—dc22 2004026718 1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06 05

Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction: Russian Identity in Its Encounter with Poland David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross / 1 1. The Irreparable Church Schism: Russian Orthodox Identity and Its Historical Encounter with Catholicism Barbara Skinner / 20 2. Imitation of Life: A Russian Guest in the Polish Regimental Family Beth Holmgren / 37 3. Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising Megan Dixon / 49 4. Appropriating Poland: Glinka, Polish Dance, and Russian National Identity Halina Goldberg / 74 5. The Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question in 1863 Andrzej Walicki / 89 6. Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners from the House of the Dead Nina Perlina / 100 7. Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question: Poland and Reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches Manon de Courten / 110 8. The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Leonid Gorizontov / 122 9. Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Nineteenth-Century Russian Politics in Warsaw Robert L. Przygrodzki / 144 10. At Home with Pani Eliza: Isaac Babel and His Polish Encounters Judith Deutsch Kornblatt / 160 11. Soviet Polonophobia and the Formulation of Nationalities Policy in the Ukrainian SSR, 1927–1934 Matthew D. Pauly / 172

Contents 12. Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ / 189 Selected Readings / 205 Contributors / 209 Index / 211

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acknowledgments

This publication is the result of many efforts and sources of support. We would like to mention first of all the assistance of the staff of the Russian and East European Institute (REEI) at Indiana University, especially the work of Assistant Director and Outreach Coordinator Denise Gardiner, who did much of the organizational preparation for the conference that led to this volume. Financial support came from REEI, principally through its Department of Education Title VI grant, and from the Polish Studies Center and the Office of International Programs at Indiana University. The dean of the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago and the Indiana University Russian and East European Institute also contributed small subsidies toward the publication of the volume. We are grateful for the support of these people and offices. In addition to the intellectual contributions of each of the authors in this work, we would like to thank Alexander Dolinin for his advice on the program of the conference and Anna Lisa Crone, Beth Holmgren, Marci Shore, and Nina Perlina for reading and commenting on the introduction. We are grateful, too, to Janet Rabinowitch of Indiana University Press, who gave us important advice and encouragement on the project from its very beginning to the final edits. DR and BS

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Polish Encounters, Russian Identity

Introduction: Russian Identity in Its Encounter with Poland David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross

Poland forms a key element in the historical creation and continuing reconstruction of Russian identity. National identity is shaped in large part through images reflected in encounters with the people of neighboring countries. Russian writers, artists, and publicists habitually viewed themselves in the mirror of Polish life and culture, employing that mirror to sharpen their perception of themselves as a people. This volume seeks to elucidate how Russian self-understanding was informed and crystallized by the encounter with Polish life and culture. The role of other neighboring peoples was likewise important but of a different and less problematic character. The boundaries of identity to the east and south were sharply drawn against the Turkic peoples and others of Muslim faith.1 To the north and northeast resided peoples of Finnic language and animistic religious practices who were distinguishable from Russians yet not threatening to Russian identity because their cultures were insufficiently attractive or accessible. Russians moved through the porous homelands of these peoples without being strongly altered by contact with them. On the contrary, the Finnic peoples with time became Christianized and, in the case of the 1

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross Mordva, largely Russianized.2 Beyond lay the lands of the so-called small peoples of the north, the Siberian tribespeople of Buddhist and Shamanist religion whose stature, appearance, and practices set them unmistakably apart from Russians and against whom Russians could easily define their difference and their sense of superiority.3 The western boundary of Russia was more problematic. The very openness and fluidity of this borderland challenged efforts to stabilize identity. Throughout history, state borders on Russia’s west shifted back and forth over a wide territory. The people who occupied this space were overwhelmingly Slavic in their speech. The language they spoke at the western end of this continuum (Polish) was different from that spoken at the eastern end (Russian), but they were linked through an infinite series of gradations with no place to draw a precise linguistic boundary. Moreover, state boundaries determined what languages would enjoy official status and would be taught in schools so that the educated elites in the borderlands usually spoke a language different from that of the common people of their region. And since the state boundaries were constantly in flux, linguistic lines were likewise unstable. This unsettled situation was further complicated by the presence of large populations of increasingly nationally conscious Jews and Ukrainians who wished to assert their own claims to autonomy and, in the case of the Ukrainians, territorial integrity. Lacking clear geographic, ethnographic, and linguistic boundaries by which they could mark their difference, Russians had to build the borders of their identity in the more rarified and contestable realms of religion and culture. These discursive fields of identity construction had the advantages and disadvantages of being inherently highly pliable and subject to both official and unofficial interpretation. Official religion, because of its institutional underpinnings, could be and indeed was imposed by one side or another when governments had the ability to do so. But conformity to religious ideas was less easily controlled, and the powerful historical associations of identity with confessional adherence proved difficult for governments to break. Cultural expression was much less institutionalized and was open to educated people across the region. It could be seductive and influential in ways that were ungovernable by states and that easily transcended political boundaries. This realm of identity formation was therefore accompanied by dangers of penetration, which provoked anxieties about the dilution of Russian identity and the corruption of Russian values that lay at the foundation of that identity. Poland was a nation of equal or greater duration and consciousness than Russia itself. Not only did it have an experience with statehood more ancient than Russia’s but it also boasted a literary language and high culture that enjoyed great appeal among its neighbors. Russia came within Poland’s cultural orbit from the late sixteenth century on, and the powerful attraction of many educated Russians to Western culture in its accessible Polish expression generated fears in Russians who were not confident of the definition and strength of their 2

Introduction own culture and therefore of its ability to resist this influence. They feared as well the power of Roman Catholicism, a more activist, aggressive, and proselytizing faith than Eastern Orthodoxy, and naturally associated it with the invasions from the West that Russia had endured in the past.4 It has often been pointed out that until the mid-nineteenth century Polish culture was the product of a single social class, the Polish nobility (szlachta), which defined the Polish ‘‘nation.’’ Yet the influence of this culture was broader and deeper than this observation would suggest. The Polish nobility was not a wafer-thin elite. This nobility was unusual in Europe in that it constituted a substantial portion of the ethnically Polish population, as much as 20 percent.5 More important, this educated and assertive social class was highly conscious of its imagined historical role in Europe and also convinced of its cultural superiority over its neighbors. This consciousness and self-assurance made the Poles no less dangerous after their conquest and incorporation into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. The Polish nation of the nobility rose in two great rebellions and numerous mutinies and conspiracies of the nineteenth century in an effort to reestablish its statehood. Although the rebellions were crushed by the military might of the tsarist state, the defeats did not blunt the force of Polish nationalism, which spread in the succeeding decades to other social classes and gradually stirred all sectors of the ethnic Polish population. By the twentieth century even some Jews and members of other minorities assimilated and identified as Poles.6 The rebellions and social expansion of the Polish nation forced Russian thinkers to confront the question of their own national identity. As we see in the essays of this volume, Russian identity proved difficult to define. It could not be readily articulated in the categories shaped by the development of Western nationalism. While Russian thinkers necessarily shared the language and conceptual categories of Western thought, their historical experience of nationhood was so closely tied to notions of monarchy and state that they had difficulty defining a path to modern nationalism that would not at the same time destroy much of what had made their country strong and nourished their sense of pride. In the Russian context, with its emphasis on the supremacy of the state and dynasty (or Party), the type of ethnic and linguistic nationalism that had developed in the West could not but seem subversive, even when used to mobilize ethnic Russians themselves. The solution to this dilemma for some of the greatest Russian thinkers of the age of nationalism, from the publicist Nikolai Danilevskii to the historians Sergei Solov’ëv and Vasilii Kliuchevskii, was to elide ethnic Russian (russkii) with the term for all subjects of the tsar (rossiiskii) and assume that nation and state were one and the same.7 This solution was, however, scarcely satisfactory to most of the non-Russian ethnic groups in the empire. In the eighteenth century members of the elites in Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic littoral assimilated to the imperial identity of ethnic Russian elites and served in state leadership positions, but by the 1840s these groups were finding nationalist 3

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross leaders who defined their peoples as separate from Russians and urged them to demand autonomy. The Poles stood somewhat apart from this development, because most Russian nationalist thinkers, including the early Slavophiles, allowed that the Poles were not Russian and not assimilable.8 Indeed, the Poles played the role of the West to Russia as Orient. Russia had its own form of ‘‘orientalism.’’9 Though its focus shifted back and forth over time across a vast borderland from southeastern Europe through the Middle East and Central Asia to East Asia (not to mention, its enveloped nonRussian Volga peoples), the Russian orient found its definition in degraded images of these peoples as uncivilized (dikie), stagnant, and despotic, even if these images, because of the contiguity of Russia’s orient, were not as sharply drawn as they were in Edward Said’s analysis of the thought of West European colonizing nations. In its relationship to its orient, Russia represented itself as the active, civilizing principle. By contrast, Russian thinkers’ view of Poland built upon exaggerated stereotypes of the anti-orientalist idea of the West, namely, that Poland was aggressive, arrogant, individualistic, greedy, and domineering. Indeed, it has always been Russia’s dilemma to be situated between two powerfully defined civilizational concepts, Orient and Occident, that leave no space for another discrete and differing definition. Petr Chaadaev wrote in 1837 that Russia should think of itself as neither East nor West but as simply the North. But Russians, while eventually discovering or inventing native institutions such as the commune with which to invest a separate identity, could not escape consideration of their similarities with either the Orient or Occident. Because identity is formed against the image of the Other, it necessarily includes the Other. In striving to distinguish what separates them, Russians and Poles have had to deny much of what unites them. In the realm of literature the commonalities are many, and for that reason we place as much emphasis on literature as on history in our choice of essays for this volume. Language is a primary marker of identity. This is especially so for Poles. After the loss of their political independence, all that was left of Poland was its cultural expression and especially its language and literature. Consequently the choices that Russians made in favoring or suppressing Polish literary expression bore greater significance for the intellectual communities of both Poles and Russians than was the case elsewhere; Polish and Russian writers and critics understood how much was at stake. Certainly the Poles reacted with hypersensitivity to such matters. The weight given to this question by the Russians, as is pointed out in the historical survey that follows, varied in proportion to the perceived threat of Polish political assertiveness. Russians freely absorbed Polish influences at certain times, for example, in the late seventeenth, early nineteenth, early twentieth, and mid-twentieth centuries, when Poland was less aggressive in its response to Russia; when Russians felt under attack, however, as after the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863, they

4

Introduction responded strongly, rejecting Polish influences and even trying to displace Polish language and culture. In sum, the process of modern Russian identity formation included in its encounters with Poland a series of attraction/repulsion responses that left a lasting imprint of Polish influence in Russian national and cultural expression (and vice versa), an imprint that by its nature has to be denied or soft-pedaled so as not to seem to compromise or contaminate an authentic Russianness, however that was defined at various times by the spokespeople for particular social strata and intellectual orientations. *** This volume is based on the contributions of scholars to a conference on ‘‘Polonophilia and Polonophobia of the Russians,’’ which took place at Indiana University on September 16–17, 2000. Most of the essays were originally presented and discussed at the conference, but two (those by Holmgren and De Courten) were solicited subsequent to the meeting. Our book explores the process of the modern Russian identity formation from a multidisciplinary perspective of history, philosophy, architecture, music, religion, and literature. We do not dwell on the complicated Russian and Polish political interrelationships but employ a fresh angle of vision, namely, the Russian perception, appropriation, and rejection of Polish life in the definition and defense of Russian identity. Russian writers, poets, and composers construed the history and artistry of Poles in ways that suggested how Russians wished to see themselves. Our objective is to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of Russian responses to the Polish Other. Polish history and culture offered a rich repository of themes, ideas, and stereotypes that Russians could use not only within the opposition of Polonophilia and Polonophobia but also through more nuanced images that transcended popular notions of Poles and Polishness. Russians did not think with one mind about Poland. As the outpost of Western Christianity in the heart of east-central Europe, Poland could not help but play a prominent symbolic role in the debates about Russian identity between Slavophile nativists and Westernizers that have been a defining feature of Russian intellectual life since the early nineteenth century. Naturally, too, the intensity of concern and involvement with Poland on the part of Russians of different ideological stripes varied over time, depending on the degree to which Poland might be regarded as a model or a threat. The historical survey that follows is intended to illuminate the character of the encounters with Poles and Poland that informed Russians as they shaped their modern identity. These encounters were longer lasting and more comprehensive than can be represented in our small collection of essays, and the survey is meant to underscore the continuing and productive interaction between these two closely related Slavic peoples.

5

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross Russians and Poles became fully aware of each other only after the Union of Lublin (1569) that united Poland with Russia’s medieval western neighbor, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Thereafter Russian contact with Poland grew rapidly. A half century later, during the Time of Troubles, a Polish army invaded Russia and occupied Moscow, an event that left a lasting imprint on Russia’s historical and artistic consciousness. As a result of this conflict many Russians sojourned in Poland either voluntarily or involuntarily, and those who were able to return home did so with a new knowledge of geography, history, literature, and religion. In the seventeenth century, the first influential imports of Polish Renaissance and Baroque literature—mediated by scholars from the Kievan Academy—entered Russia. It was then that Polish poetry, and Jan Kochanowski’s writings in particular, influenced the syllabic system of Russian poetry. The personal libraries of Russia’s leading statesmen and clerics in the seventeenth century contained large numbers of Polish-language works, either originals or Polish translations of western European writers. Poland functioned as a primary mediator of Western Latin culture in the eighteenth century as the Russian elite unself-consciously absorbed foreign ideas and adopted Western costume, manners, and cultural institutions such as academies, music, theater, and forms of socializing, at least until a sufficient number of Russians, having learned German and French, could go directly to the source.10 Again, in the late twentieth century, when educated Russians were cut off from the West, Poland played the role of cultural mediator, as Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ explains in her contribution on Joseph Brodsky in this volume. The time of unself-conscious cultural borrowing peaked in the late eighteenth century and found its antidote in the critical travel writings of Denis Fonvizin and Nicholas Karamzin, who, though admiring of much in the West, pointed out many of the weaknesses of European societies. Other evidence of this turn can be found in the harangues of Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov about moral breakdown in Russia and the efforts of Slavonic-language preservationists such as Aleksandr Shishkov and D. I. Khvostov to defend a ‘‘pure’’ Russian vocabulary against westernisms. Educated Russians began to fear submersion in a sea of westernism. They worried about losing their distinctive heritage and the appreciation of what made them Russian. Russian thinkers began to draw lines, to define what was valuable and worth preserving in their own culture and way of life.11 It was at this time that they began to draw the contrast between what they regarded as the dry and cold legalism of the West and the imagined rich spirituality of Russian life and culture, a distinction that was subsequently elaborated by the Slavophiles and their descendents. The West and its Polish outpost may have had more developed artistic institutions and a highly articulated legal system, but these expressions of Western culture, according to Russia’s defenders, lacked human warmth, harmony, and the deep spirituality of Russian life. Empress Catherine II was able to act more concretely. Identity in this era was still largely understood in confessional terms, and so in the realm of 6

Introduction government action Russians alleviated their fears of subversion by fixing the religious boundaries of the open frontier that fell to Russia as a result of the partitions of Poland. In the middle ages, Russians and Poles had adopted different versions of Christianity and worked them into ideological bastions of national identity over the centuries since the initial break between the Eastern and Western churches. As Barbara Skinner explains in the essay that opens this volume, these issues came to a head in the Counter Reformation, when Catholic Poland made deep inroads into territories inhabited by peoples of Orthodox religion, converted them to the Uniate Church, and placed them under the authority of Rome. The partitions of the eighteenth century brought these territories under direct Russian sovereignty, and conflict ensued when the Russian government refused to accept the conversion and demanded that the Uniates rejoin the Eastern Orthodox community. Empress Catherine II became convinced that religious conformity would reinforce Russian political control in the borderlands while properly defining the boundary between Russia and Poland. Skinner points out that this solution could not work because the people of this borderland had acquired a separate Uniate identity that could not simply be exchanged for the official Orthodox identity of the Russian Empire. And Skinner’s pioneering parish-level investigations demonstrate that this separate identity was not borne by the clerical and noble elites only, as the Russians assumed, but penetrated all levels of society. Despite forceful reconversion, the Uniate community continually slid back into its preferred religious identity. The issue of a separate Uniate consciousness and conviction continues to this day to be a bone of contention, as Uniate communities, persecuted a second time under the Soviet regime, struggle in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet bloc to regain the autonomy and properties lost in these earlier persecutions. The absorption of Poland into the Russian Empire and the forceful reconversion of Uniates did not settle the matter for Russian thinkers. Anxieties about the influence of this alien element continued and, indeed, seem to have increased in view of the difficulties of defining and containing a threat that now lay inside the realm. But for a time this issue became submerged in the great clash of arms between the expanding Napoleonic Empire and Russia.12 After the retreat of the Grande Armée from Russia and the final defeat of Napoleon, Emperor Alexander I established the Kingdom of Poland as a constitutional monarchy within the Russian Empire. Poles within the Kingdom enjoyed a large measure of autonomy and could freely use their language and develop their culture. They even had their own Polish army, although it stood ultimately under the command of the tsar and his viceroy. Emperor Alexander had hoped that Poland might provide a model for the eventual liberalization of the Russian government.13 A brief era of goodwill and close cultural interaction between Russians and Poles ensued. This was the time of the flowering of Romantic literature, when some of the leading writers of Russia, for example, Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Evgenii Baratynskii, and 7

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross Nikolai Gogol, expressed a deep appreciation for Polish literature. This was also the period in which the two greatest poets of Poland and Russia, Adam Mickiewicz and Aleksandr Pushkin, became personally acquainted and exerted a creative influence on each other. Polish literature captured the imagination of some of the best young Russian writers. The poets Kondratii Ryleev and Petr Viazemskii, who found themselves on Polish territory during and after the war against Napoleon, became fascinated with neo-classical Polish literature and translated it into Russian. The same historical events that landed these Russian poets in Poland also brought the notorious transvestite Russian officer and memoirist Nadezhda Durova to that country and allowed her to engage with Poles of a variety of social statuses. Durova’s issues of identity had plainly as much to do with gender as with nationality, and, though later a literary figure herself, she did not, like Viazemskii and Ryleev, play the role of mediator between Russian and Polish literatures. As Beth Holmgren points out in her essay, ‘‘Imitation of Life: A Russian Guest in the Polish Regimental Family,’’ this young woman, moving within the zone of military operations, performed the part of a conventional Russian cavalry officer in occupation of a foreign land without seeming to distinguish between pro- and anti-Russian attitudes of her Polish hosts. Her story tells of her ability to radiate a misleading erotic aura among women, especially Polish ladies, whom she admired in an altogether stereotypical fashion. In Holmgren’s reading, Durova represents a case of a carefree coexistence that leveled all political and cultural differences between Poles and Russians. Holmgren views Durova’s case within the aesthetics of imitation and ethics of conformity. While Durova encountered some obstacles in her imitation of a male tsarist army officer, she effectively adopted the military ethos and its chivalrous system of social values. Holmgren reads against the grain of the usual construction of women-soldiers’ identity as nonconventional; she demythologizes this seemingly daring gesture as a decision prompted by the need to conform that reveals how entrapped Durova was in her game of double identity. Durova’s story could nevertheless be accepted as a sign of the goodwill that characterized the personal relations of many educated Poles and Russians in this era of liberalization. Another fascinating aspect of this period that reveals the temporary elision of Polish and Russian identities at the level of the elites was the frequent use of Polish nobility patents to endow the illegitimate offspring of Russian nobility with the privileges and protections of that class. The Catherinian dignitary Ivan Betskoi, the famous poet and tutor of the later tsar Alexander II, Vasilii Zhukovskii, and the son of the powerful Alexandrine administrator Aleksei Arakcheev, Mikhail Shumskii, among others, were brought into the imperial nobility through patents purchased from Polish gentry families.14 Indeed, Grigorii Potemkin, the most powerful man in Russia for much of the reign of Catherine II, came from western Russia, the Smolensk region, and referred to himself as a Pole. Issues of identity that later inflamed Russian 8

Introduction nativist and nationalist responses to Poles did not seem to be salient among the Russian elite in this earlier era. Even below the elite level, direct influences on cultural production such as portraiture among wealthy or well-placed nonnoble Russians was arriving from Poland and being adopted willingly.15 However hopeful and mutually enriching this period of experimentation in politics and culture, the tension inherent in the harboring of a liberal constitutional monarchy within the body of an autocratic state was too great to be sustained over time, especially in an era of rising national feeling. The Russian victory over Napoleon released a powerful wave of patriotism in Russia that affected thinkers across the political spectrum. And in the patriotic discourse of Russian writers and publicists, both conservatives and radicals found a central place for Poland. Conservatives resented and feared the political order in Poland as a model that could attract discontented Russians and lead to an upheaval and overthrow of the unified authoritarian rule that the conservatives considered absolutely essential to the maintenance of Russian power and their traditional way of life.16 Liberals and radicals resented the fact that the Poles, many of whom had fought with the Napoleonic forces and lost, were allowed to enjoy constitutional government, while, in their view, the Russian victors continued to suffer autocracy and the knout. These liberals and radicals were proud of Russia’s might and their own role in liberating Europe, and yet they returned home to an unreformed Russia that offered them no scope to express their nationalist and democratic feelings. Their hopes for change frustrated, they went into opposition. Meeting in secret societies, they built links to underground Polish patriots who also opposed tsarist rule. These conspiracies led to the Decembrist rebellion (1825). The subsequent crackdown on Russian and Polish dissidents and the narrowing of Polish autonomy ended the era of goodwill between Poles and Russians and ignited the Polish uprising of 1830, which the Russian government crushed in a series of violent repressions. Poland lost its autonomy and was made an organic part of the Russian Empire. These events also ruptured the friendship between the two great poets, Mickiewicz and Pushkin. They had become acquainted during Mickiewicz’s enforced exile in Russia in 1820, when Pushkin, like others of his time, was captivated by Mickiewicz’s gift for improvisation. The friendship between these two leading Slavic poets, though tinged with rivalry, was real and productive—but could not survive Polish rebellion.17 For Pushkin, as for many other Russians, the Polish uprising of 1830 proved a shock and an unforgivable betrayal; what the Poles saw as a war for independence was, for Pushkin and other Russians, an unjustified rebellion.18 Uncharacteristically, for he seldom adopted obvious political poses, Pushkin published a series of anti-Polish patriotic odes. In her essay, ‘‘Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising,’’ Megan Dixon places these unusual and often conveniently forgotten poems within Pushkin’s oeuvre, as well as within later discussions of the poet’s ideas and commitments. Dixon argues that the poet’s ideological posi9

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross tion, which resulted in a refashioning of his public image, was evinced by his encounter with Poland as a distant and invisible source of problems. Poland, a country he had never visited, was, for Pushkin, something of an abstraction which he now chose to deploy as a sign that would reinforce his claim to be Russia’s national poet, and a definer and defender of Russia’s unstable border toward the West. Following the Decembrist and Polish uprisings and the challenging ‘‘Philosophical Letter’’ of Petr Chaadaev that questioned whether Russia had any worthwhile identity or independent contribution to civilization, Russian thinkers and artists of the late 1830s and 1840s had to face squarely the question of how Russia could be defined and its destiny understood. The government, too, felt the need to provide an answer. The Enlightenment ideas of Catherine the Great had succumbed to the organic notions of the Romantic age and no longer enjoyed the appeal they had had a half century earlier. The promise of liberalization under Alexander I was stranded on the rocks of European state conservatism and the Holy Alliance, evoking discontent and revolt both in Russia and in Poland. Nicholas I and his advisers responded to the failure of these previous ideologies by concocting the doctrine of Official Nationality, which sought to preserve the authoritarian bureaucratic order created by Peter the Great by tying it to romanticized notions of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the special character of the Russian folk (which was represented as superior to and not consonant with the values and practices of the European peoples to the West). The answer of critical thinkers in Russia appeared in two forms: (1) a nativist response known as Slavophilism that harkened back to the imagined values and practices of the pre-Petrine era; and (2) an assertion of Russia’s place among European nations by the so-called westernizers, who asked for political participation and social reform that would bring Russia more quickly and surely into the ranks of modern European countries. Although this is the usual classification of intellectual programs of Russian identity in this period, in some arenas of Russian life we can see a more complicated play of Polish representations of the Western Other. Take, for example, the realm of music where in the work of Mikhail Glinka the use of Polish musical forms in the construction of Russianness proved to be paradoxical. In her essay, ‘‘Appropriating Poland: Glinka, Polish Dance, and Russian National Identity,’’ Halina Goldberg discusses ‘‘Ivan Susanin’’ (‘‘Life for the Tsar,’’ world premiere 1836), the story of a Russian peasant hero during the Time of Troubles who united the common folk and the elite against foreign invaders, a characteristically Russian romantic nationalist notion that tied the fate of the people to the dynasty and state. In the opera the Polish nobility is portrayed as arrogant and vengeful, and its hostile poses are supported and identified musically with polonaises and mazurkas. Yet these same dance forms appeared in other sites of Russian musical expression without negative associations and indeed were among the most popular Russian dances of the 10

Introduction nineteenth century. A polonaise composed to celebrate victory over the Turks in 1791 (and which, after the partitions, also became associated with the conquest of Poland) even served as the tsarist anthem before the adoption of ‘‘God Save the Tsar’’ in 1833. And the ceremonial use of Polish musical genres did not end after the anti-Russian associations of ‘‘Ivan Susanin.’’ ‘‘Festival Polonaise,’’ Glinka’s last notable composition, was performed during the coronation ball of Alexander II in 1855. The musical expression of Poland seemed to enjoy an almost Slavophile sweep and could be symbolically and ceremonially associated with Russian as well as Polish identities. In the writings of the nativist intellectuals, we see a much less ambiguous stance toward the Polish Other. Andrzej Walicki’s contribution to this volume offers a survey of the troubled relationship of Russian publicists to Poland as expressed in the writings of the Russian Slavophiles and Panslavists. After reprising the history of this relationship, Walicki focuses on the specific ramifications of the Polish uprising against Russian domination in 1863, a rebellion that threw into sharp relief the contradictions in the Slavophile aspiration to unite all Slavic peoples. Walicki considers in detail the views of Nikolai Strakhov, Iurii Samarin, and especially Ivan Aksakov. All these thinkers were aware of the power of Polish Catholic civilization yet firmly believed that Russia was the land of the future. They accordingly sought justifications for Russia’s suppression of Polish culture in the greater goal of advancing the unity of all the Slavic and Orthodox peoples under Russia’s leadership. They used the historicist, evolutionist, and social class analyses of the age to construct a version of events that allowed them to acknowledge the ascendancy of Polish culture in the past while showing its inadequacy and even danger for the future of Slavic civilization. The career of Ivan Aksakov illustrates the evolution of this nativist critique from the ideas of the early Slavophiles, who rejected militancy and even opposed the tsarist government, to the Panslavist writers of the 1860s and beyond, who supported the russification policies of the regime and even goaded it into war. Walicki points out that the rebellious Poles aided the cause of the Russian Panslavists, because the Polish insurrections provoked responses from the Russians that helped to shape a modern Russian national consciousness. Ethnographers are finding that even some sectors of the Russian peasantry were acquiring a national consciousness and identity in this period, an identity that was built in some measure against the images of the threatening Polish ‘‘pany’’ along the western border of Russia. The evidence can be found in soldiers’ songs and popular legends collected by village priests and other close observers of peasant life. Among villagers, the story of Ivan Susanin and the violent eviction of the Poles from Moscow was still alive in the nineteenth century. The memory of Napoleon’s invasion was even more central and vivid in the peasant imagination and helped villagers to define Russians in opposition to threats from the West coming through Poland. The contacts of Russian soldiers with other Slavic peoples during the wars of the 1870s further marked 11

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross out their difference and raised their consciousness of a separate national identity not wholly consonant with confessional identities.19 Three important Russian thinkers of the mid- to late nineteenth century expressed ambivalent views about Poland. For each of these writers, Poland formed an important element in the construction of Russian identity. Although each writer had his own individual stance in regard to Poland, something peculiarly Russian characterized the attitudes of each of them. The first was Aleksandr Herzen, the prolific essayist, memoirist, and revolutionary of the mid-century who escaped to the West and published the famous oppositionist magazine The Bell. Herzen is often seen as a friend of Poland. He certainly was a friend of many Poles and valued Polish history and culture. He naturally sympathized with Polish resistance to the Russian autocratic state and joined enthusiastically in celebrations of the struggle against tsarism waged jointly by Polish patriots and Russian liberals. But Herzen’s sympathy had its limits. He found Catholicism and the commercial culture of the West repellent, and, in his view, Poland represented both in a virulent form. In this respect, Herzen shared the Slavophiles’ distaste for Polish life and defined Russianness in opposition to these constructions of Polishness. In other words, Herzen wished to see Russians as a people not concerned with the greedy pursuit of personal gain. Like the Slavophiles, he wanted to think of Russians as exceptional, a people imbued with the virtues of Eastern Orthodox piety and brotherhood. He seized on the idea of the village commune, discovered in the observations and writings of the German scholar August von Haxthausen in the 1840s, to define a Russian identity that included the Slavophile notion of the unity of the Russian people in a socialism that grew out of native soil. Ambivalence about the relationship of Russians to Poles may also be found in the writings and life of the great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821– 1881). His polonophobia is usually seen as comparable in its intensity only to his anti-Semitic resentments, both of which appear often enough in his major writings. And after the Polish uprising of 1863, his hostility toward the Poles and his identification of Russianness with Orthodoxy appear to have become complete. But in the 1850s Dostoevsky had a close personal encounter with Poles during his Siberian imprisonment and gave an uncharacteristically benign account of these Poles in his Notes from the House of the Dead. His chapter on them is titled ‘‘Comrades,’’ and his narrator shows understanding for their feelings and their sense of personal commitment and dignity, even if he does not necessarily agree with their point of view and continues to see them as people apart and alien. In her essay in this volume, Nina Perlina investigates the creation of this story and includes in her analysis a memoir by Szymon Tokarzewski that challenges Dostoevsky’s Notes. She thereby enriches her reading of the ‘‘structure of interfering narratives’’ in the Notes with a view from the Polish Other. By making the distinction between the ‘‘I’’ of the narrator of the novel and the ‘‘I’’ of the author, Perlina examines a multifocal 12

Introduction vision of reality and the precision of the novel’s changing perspectives. In her subtle reading, the narrator’s (if not the author’s) sympathy for Polish fellow prisoners is intermingled with the questions of identity and loyalty that allow us to question the strength of Dostoevsky’s later thoroughgoing antagonism to Poles. Perlina’s essay is of interest, too, for being one of the few efforts these days to demonstrate connections between Russian and Polish writings. Her work is the exception that proves the rule that Russians and Poles feel a need to deny or minimize the cultural links that have long bound them. Yet it is revealing that even someone as famously anti-Polish as Dostoevsky could open a conceptual space for the appreciation of some stereotypical characteristics of Poles, characteristics such as pride, self-assertion, and individuality that Russian nativists set in opposition to their definitions of Russian identity. The third important thinker is the religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv. He gave more serious and sustained consideration to the future of Poland than did either Herzen or Dostoevsky. As Manon de Courten explains in her essay in this volume, Solov’ëv sincerely hoped and even planned for a reconciliation of the Eastern and Western Christian churches, and it was this ambition that drove his thinking about Polish history and culture. Unlike his father Sergei Solov’ëv, Russia’s most prolific historian, Vladimir Solov’ëv apprehended history not empirically but symbolically. He attached meanings to the major events in the history of Russia’s relations with Poland that would justify his belief in the ultimate union of Christianity through Russia’s nurturing and tolerant stance toward Poland. His view of history was, however, conveniently truncated. In essence, he reduced Polish history to the disorders of the eighteenth century and was therefore able to defend the partitions and even the suppression of the 1863 rebellion as being in Poland’s best interest. To borrow a concept from a later period, Russia appears in his conception as the wise and tolerant Older Brother. Where Solov’ëv parted company with the tsarist government and his Panslavist friends is in fiercely criticizing the policy of russification of Poland. He emphasized that only through tolerance and mutual respect could the unity of Christianity ultimately be achieved. Solov’ëv’s construction of Russian identity nevertheless tied Russia to a Panslav and finally pan-Christian empire. As in his understanding of Polish and Russian relations, Russia had to take the leading role in fostering and directing this unified Christian realm. Russian identity and values, in Solov’ëv’s view, were tolerant and accepting of Polish difference and for that reason ultimately superior to Polish values. In contrast to this somewhat benign and tolerant vision of a unified Christianity under Russian tutelage were the inflammatory voices of the Russian conservative press of the late nineteenth century. Leonid Gorizontov observes in his essay for this volume that the boundary of the Polish lands and other areas authorized for Polish settlement in the Russian Empire shifted even after most of Poland became part of the Russian Empire, and he identifies the 13

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross Russian right-wing press as responsible for the shifting boundary. The conservative publicists incited fears of penetration of the body of western and central Russia by the alien and assertive Polish population. Sanitary zones were accordingly established in the western provinces in the hope of limiting this ‘‘unsanitary’’ intrusion, which reflected suspicions that Poles were winning the competition with Russians in many fields of endeavor and placing Russians under a state of siege in their own house. This phobia ultimately generated a deeper form of paranoia, as Russian conservatives conflated fears of Poles and Jews into a combined Polish-Jewish plot to undermine the integrity of the tsarist state and dissolve it into many separate pieces. Gorizontov’s analysis suggests the fragility of Russian identity in the minds of the conservative writers. These most forceful articulators of the Russian idea, of Russianness, feared the challenge of the Poles and remained uncertain of the ability of Russians to stave off a perceived assault by a culture as cohesive and assertive as the Polish. This fear was especially pronounced among what could be called the Russian colonial community in Poland, the ethnic Russian administrators in Warsaw and elsewhere in Russian-occupied Poland. Anxieties about loss of their identity and their native culture ran high among these Russians, because many of them had come to Poland as single men and married Polish women. Rightly fearing that their children would drift toward the culture of their mothers, they found one solution to their dilemma in the establishment of a special Russian school for their children in Warsaw. And they furnished the building in which it resided with an assertively Russian-style architectural makeover. Architecture is a powerful medium for inscribing memory and establishing historical and thus identity claims. In his essay for this volume, Robert Przygrodzki tells the fascinating story of this building known as the Staszic Palace, an edifice that occupies a central space in the Polish capital. The ground on which it stood earlier served as the place of interment for a Russian boyar-tsar of the seventeenth century. In the wake of the Polish rebellion of 1863, Przygrodzki tells us, Russians drew on this memory of their boyar-tsar and made the building into a school for Russians of the Eastern Orthodox faith. In the 1890s, they further underlined the association of this central Warsaw edifice with Eastern Orthodoxy and Russian imperial identity by renovating the building in pseudo-Byzantine style, a statement not lost on the Poles, who after winning their independence in 1918 immediately stripped the building of its Russian associations. The turn of the twentieth century brought to Russia a renewed interest in Polish literature that can be compared only to the enthusiasm of the 1820s. Despite the continuing insecurities expressed by the conservative press and the Russian colonial community in Poland, Russian cultural figures seemed to be more curious about and open to the influences coming from the Polish lands. Was this a reaction to the efforts by the conservatives and the Russian government to destroy Polish literary and cultural expression? Whatever the causes, the most tangible proof of this ‘‘renaissance’’ of interest in Polish 14

Introduction culture was the more than five hundred articles and studies published in Russia between 1895 and 1917 about Mickiewicz and his work, including Aleksandr Pogodin’s two-volume monograph dedicated to the Polish poet.20 The fiery poetry of Juliusz Slowacki captured the attention of the Russian symbolists, Konstantin Bal’mont in particular.21 While the taste of the general reading public of that time remained more traditional, favoring translations of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s contemporary novels, the openness to Polish writing remained evident until the fall of the old order. The ability of Russians to experience and respond to Poland through its literature became restricted during the subsequent interwar period. The culture of the newly independent Poland was accessible only to the extent that Soviet censorship allowed it to enter Russia, and this was normally limited to translations of the works of the so-called revolutionary poets and writers such as Wladyslaw Broniewski, Wanda Wasilewska, and Leon Kruczkowski. Their proletarian and leftist writings pointedly illustrate the circulation of ideology as it was often borrowed by them from their Soviet comrades-in-writing only to be re-textualized in Polish, and, once translated into Russian, returned to its inspirational source. One important Russian-Jewish source of images of Poland in the period following the advent of the Soviet regime in Russia was the stories of Isaac Babel based on his experience in the war between Russia and Poland in the early 1920s. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt’s essay in this volume, ‘‘At Home with Pani Eliza: Izaac Babel and His Polish Encounters,’’ offers an excursion into this territory of Babel’s fiction. She juxtaposes the writer’s Polish and Jewish characters so as to expose a number of similarities that undercut established scholarly views of Babel’s supposedly negative attitude toward Poles. She observes that Jews were constantly driven from place to place, while Poles stayed more or less in the same territory. But the Poles’ stability was only an illusion, because they had to suffer frequent and wide-ranging shifts in the borders of their country. The ‘‘wandering Jew’’ is compared to the ‘‘wandering’’ borders of Poland. Recording a number of other parallels in Babel’s presentation of Poles and Jews, Kornblatt calls into question the established view that Poles play the role of anti-Semites in Babel’s fiction. She revises current opinion by crediting Babel with a more positive view of his Polish characters. Thus she identifies another point in the spectrum of Russian responses to Poles. Babel’s contribution to the question of Russian identity is modified by his position as a socialist and a Jew. The role of socialism and the project of remaking humanity free of national and ethnic passions may be of central importance here, but efforts in this direction on the part of the Soviet leadership soon ended, a response to international politics and the fears of attack across the socialist/capitalist divide in Europe. Once the wars concluded and relations between Soviet Russia and Poland began to settle into the routines of diplomacy, the long-standing Russian fears of Polish aggression and subversion resurfaced, this time strongly influenced 15

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross by Soviet Marxist thinking. The focus on class conflict brought back into sharp relief the role of the Polish nobility, the notorious ‘‘pany,’’ who were now as much feared for their class vengeance as for their cultural influence. The geographic focus turned to Ukraine, a traditional site of conflict between Russia and Poland from the sixteenth century on. The war with Poland in the early 1920s and subsequent assassinations of Soviet officials in Poland convinced Soviet leaders that the Polish nobility was bent on disrupting and then taking over large areas of Ukraine. This version of Polonophobia, as Matthew Pauly details in his essay in this volume, led to serious consequences for Ukrainian officials suspected of abetting such conspiracies and also led to a major shift in nationality policy in the USSR. Soviet leaders retreated from the policy of acknowledging and nurturing the national identity of non-Russians and returned to a Russian national model for all peoples of the USSR. Although they labeled this identity Soviet, it was constructed of Russian elements and thus signaled a return to the Russian imperial model of the tsarist state and the elision of russkii this time with sovetskii. A recent study of the Polish theme in pre–World War II Soviet cinema tells how the time-tested stereotypes of Poles, or better the Polish ‘‘pany’’ elite, were trotted out once again to generate Russian enmity toward these western neighbors and to bolster Russian pride in their difference. Poles were portrayed as ‘‘arrogant, lying, greedy, filled with national haughtiness and hostile feelings toward their neighbors, and inclined to be parasitical and grasping.’’22 In these mainly historical films the gentry came across as the worst of the West, as the Slavophiles of the nineteenth century had seen them, ‘‘greedy and beggarly, threatening and empty.’’ The forceful imposition of a Russian imperial identity in the post–World War II Soviet Union and the swelling patriotism of the victorious Russians may have allowed them to be again more accepting of Polish national expression, especially since at this time Poland once more was firmly subordinated to Russia politically. Polish literary works were published in the Soviet Union in unprecedented numbers of copies. Of particular interest were editions of Polish classics, especially those of the nineteenth century, frequently provided with lengthy introductions.23 Evidently, Russian readers had a healthy appetite for Polish fiction. Beginning in the period of the thaw that followed the death of Joseph Stalin, cultural life in Poland became more open. In comparison to Russia and most other countries of the Soviet bloc, Poland enjoyed a more relaxed censorship regime, and Polish readers were able to gain access to most major Western literary works. Poland therefore functioned as a conduit for importation of these forbidden fruits to a Russian intelligentsia eager as always to be acquainted with the culture of the West. One aspect of this fascinating and still little studied history is elucidated in this volume by Irena Grudzinska-Gross, ´ who analyzes Joseph Brodsky’s long engagement with Polish literature as well as his personal contacts with Poles during his years in the Soviet Union. For 16

Introduction the young Brodsky, who took it upon himself to learn Polish and translate Polish poetry, Polish books, periodicals, and translations of Western literature played a mediating role as the ‘‘window to the West,’’ just as they had for educated Russians in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Curiously, as Grudzinska-Gross reports, despite Brodsky’s lifelong warm relationship with Polish intellectuals and his deep knowledge of Polish poetry, this idiom does not seem to have left a strong imprint on his own poetry. The influence of Poland on Brodsky came more in the access it afforded him ‘‘to cultural models and languages, Polish and others, that enriched his idiom.’’ Poland’s historic rebelliousness bore a relationship to Brodsky’s own rebellious stand against the solipsism of Soviet Russian poetry. Polish culture furnished him with examples of absurd humor, magic realism, and colorful objects. He felt a kinship with the great Polish poets. Brodsky also pointed out that the influence of Poland on Russian writers in this period was not confined to himself. Poland was, he reported to a Polish writer in the 1960s, ‘‘the poetics of [my] generation.’’ *** This volume invites readers to view Russians’ encounters with their closest and most assertive western neighbor, whose culture was at once accessible, attractive, and threatening. We observe Russians as they respond to the challenges posed by Polish life and culture. Russian writers, artists, and publicists could not avoid defining themselves in opposition to this close neighbor and Slavic relative. And Russians could not escape taking the Poles into account when shaping their notions of who they were and where they were headed. The essays that follow will illuminate the historical and cultural encounter between these two Slavic nations. NOTES 1. But this should be qualified on the basis of recent studies by Robert P. Geraci (Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001]), Thomas M. Barrett (At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700–1860 [Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999]), Willard Sunderland (Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004]), and others, that show negotiation of space and identity in these borderlands. The views of Russian intellectuals about Russia’s east or orient are summarized in Vera Tolz, Russia (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), a volume in the series ‘‘Inventing the Nation,’’ chap. 4. 2. Seppo Lallukka, The East Finnic Minorities in the Soviet Union: An Appraisal of the Erosive Trends (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1990), esp. 87–102. 3. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). 4. See, for example, Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 94–115.

17

David L. Ransel and Bozena Shallcross 5. Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Essex: Pearson Education, 2001), 216. 6. The relationship between the Jews and the Poles was, of course, lengthy and troubled. For a detailed history, see Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992). 7. Tolz, Russia, 158. 8. Ibid., 196. 9. For examples and discussion from the point of view of historians, see Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). In the field of literature, see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). 10. P. N. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury, Vol. 3, Natsionalizm i obshchestvennoe mnenie, 2 parts (St. Petersburg, 1913), part 1. 11. Mark Al’tshuller, Predtechi slavionofil’stva v russkoi literature (Obshchestvo ‘‘Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 38– 49, 175–209. 12. Although it is true that many Poles fought with Napoleon against the dynastic regimes that opposed the French Revolution and its exportation, a fact commemorated in the final section of the Polish national text, Pan Tadeusz. 13. Janet M. Hartley, Alexander I (London: Longman, 1994), 166–70. 14. Olga E. Glagoleva, ‘‘Illegitimate Children of the Russian Nobility: Law and Practice,’’ paper delivered at the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Toronto, November, 2003. 15. L. I. Tananaeva, ‘‘Portretnye formy v Pol’she i Rossii v XVIII veke. Nekotorye sviazi i paralleli,’’ Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie, 81:1 (Moscow, 1982), cited in N. A Pervezentseva, ‘‘Kupecheskii portret v kontekste russkoi portretnoi zhivopisi,’’ ‘‘Dlia pamiati potomstvu svoemu . . .’’: Narodnyi bytovoi portret v Rossii (Moscow: Galart, 1993), 25–36, which includes further discussion. 16. An example in triumphalist garb can be found in Nikolai Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia and more directly in a memorandum to Alexander I submitted in 1819, ‘‘Mnenie russkogo grazhdanina,’’ Neizdannye sochineniia i perepiska Nikolaia Mikhailovicha Karamzina (St. Petersburg, 1862), 3–8 (cited in Richard Pipes, ed., Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). 17. See, for example, Waclaw Lednicki, ‘‘Mickiewicz’ Stay in Russia and his Friendship with Pushkin,’’ in Adam Mickiewicz in World Literature, ed. W. Lednicki (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956). Indeed, Mickiewicz, while still in Russia, composed a long incendiary poem, Konrad Wallenrod, that is credited with fueling the 1830 insurrection. For a short survey of Mickiewicz’s life and work and his relations with the Russians, see Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 208–32. 18. The Polish uprising caused anguish and a gradual change of pro-Polish sympathies even among such writers as Nikolai Leskov, whose admiration for Polish literature extended beyond friendship and social ties with Polish writers; he had a mastery of Polish language, which was unusual for Russians of his time. See Hugh McLean,

18

Introduction Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). 19. A. V. Buganov, Russkaia istoriia v pamiati krest’ian XIX veka i natsional’noe samosoznanie (Moscow: Institut Etnologii i Antropologii N. N. Miklukho-Maklaia, 1992), passim; on Poles and Susanin, see, esp., 111–14, 124–25. 20. Aleksandr Pogodin, Adam Mitskevich, ego zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1912). 21. Although they also were interested in Zygmunt Krasinski, ´ the third of the great Polish Romantic poets. 22. V. A. Tokarev, ‘‘’Kará panam! Kará!’: Pol’skaia tema v predvoennom kino (1939–1941 gody), Otechestvennaia istoriia (2003): 6, 47–67; see, esp., 54–56. 23. One should mention also the remarkable editorial achievement of publishing a fifteen-volume edition of postwar Polish prose that appeared in the Soviet Union during the years 1974–86, under the imprint of four different publication houses (seven volumes were published by Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, three by Progress, one by Molodaia Gvardiia, and one by Iskusstvo; no editor is listed).

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one

The Irreparable Church Schism Russian Orthodox Identity and Its Historical Encounter with Catholicism Barbara Skinner

Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ukraine in June 2001 provoked indignation and outrage from the Russian Orthodox Church. The largest Orthodox community in Ukraine remains subordinate to the Moscow patriarch, who firmly opposed the visit and denounced it as an affront to the dominant Christian community in the region.1 In the previous year, as the new Russian president Vladimir Putin made a state visit to the Vatican, the Moscow patriarchate insisted that the Pope would not be welcome in Russia itself until ‘‘the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church resolve their differences.’’2 These ‘‘differences’’ center on a millennium of contested doctrine and Russian accusations that Roman Catholicism has for the past four centuries illicitly extended its influence into traditional Orthodox regions through the Trojan horse of the Uniate, or Greek Catholic Church, which today claims five million adherents in Ukraine. Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Aleksii II, announced that meeting with Pope John Paul II was impossible while ‘‘the Greek-Catholic war continues against Orthodox believers in Ukraine and until the Vatican stops its expansion into Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.’’3 Ironically these fighting words were uttered even as John Paul II had 20

The Irreparable Church Schism declared his mission to Ukraine to be one of promoting peace and reconciliation between the two branches of Christianity—Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—that officially divided in schism nearly a thousand years ago, in 1054. Over the past millennium repeated attempts to reconcile differences between the two churches have not been successful, continually derailing on doctrinal disputes, particularly the issue of papal supremacy, which the Eastern Church cannot accept. Today the fault line between the two churches in northeastern Europe falls in the newly independent countries of Ukraine and Belarus. Previously these battle lines of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic faiths concurred with the political borders between the PolishLithuanian and Muscovite states. The historical clash between the Eastern and Western churches shaped and often heavily influenced Russian-Polish relations. Through the centuries the Muscovite and Russian imperial view so closely identified Poles with the Catholic faith that Russian Orthodox opposition to Catholicism was inextricable from opposition to and even hatred of the Poles. This role of religion in foreign affairs merits more consideration than it has traditionally received in our secular age, particularly given the religious revival and the increasing force of religious identity in the post-communist world. Russia’s relations with its Roman Catholic neighbor have been deeply marked by the Russian Orthodox conviction that it stands on the correct side of the doctrinal schism between Eastern and Western churches and that it is the lawful successor church to the Eastern Slavs residing in Polish-Lithuanian lands. This view particularly gathered strength as Russia expanded its empire westward in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and seized the eastern provinces of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where Orthodoxy was being supplanted by the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church). The Russian stance reflected a profound concern for the cultural integrity of the Eastern Slavs and animosity toward the Catholic Church for making inroads into traditionally Orthodox regions. As revealed in the recent Orthodox outbursts in Ukraine, this anti-Catholic stance has reemerged in the post-Soviet world. The anti-Catholic position of the Russian Orthodox Church has deep roots extending to its Byzantine heritage in Kievan Rus’. Christianity in Rus’, which was under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople, developed at a time when the Eastern and Western churches were entering into an officially recognized schism that reflected the growing cultural differences between the Greek Eastern and Latin/Germanic Western inheritors of the Roman Empire.4 Opposition to the Western papal church filtered into the Orthodox Slavic lands that were administratively tied to Constantinople through the continued influx of Greek clerics, monks, and bishops. Byzantine and South Slavic anti-Latin polemical writings were translated into Church Slavonic and entered into important Russian Orthodox texts, serving as a basis for anti-Catholic rhetoric in later centuries.5 21

Barbara Skinner Constant contact with the West ameliorated the relationship to the Western Church in the southwestern Rus’ territories (Ukrainian and Belarusian provinces) that were eventually incorporated into the Lithuanian and Polish states. The northeastern Rus’ principalities, however, had substantially less contact with representatives of the Western Church (and therefore less understanding of it), and, in the early centuries of Mongol rule—when the metropolitan relocated to the Moscow region from Kyiv—experienced increased isolation from the West. At this time northwestern Rus’ encountered representatives of the Western Church through its conflict with Swedish crusaders and Teutonic Knights, who presented a militant form of Roman Christianity and were soundly defeated by Novgorodian Prince Alexander Nevskii. This victory was later celebrated by Muscovite chroniclers, and hagiographers promoted a Russian Orthodox sense of superiority to what was perceived as a violently expansive Western Christianity.6 The eventual political ascendancy of the Muscovite state accompanied a strengthened and flourishing Russian Orthodox culture that stressed its piety and purity from all heresy, including the ‘‘errors’’ of Western Christianity. The Russian Church manifested a profound sense of righteousness that stemmed from its perceived adherence to a pure faith. As the Moscow principality led the fight for independence from their Mongol overlords, who converted in the fourteenth century to Islam, Muscovite Church leaders actively promoted the political struggle as a religious battle against Muslim ‘‘infidels.’’ Their sense of righteousness strengthened as, simultaneously, Byzantium was submitting to Muslim Ottoman expansion. When desperation for assistance against the Ottoman Turks drove Constantinople to sign a church union with Rome (1439) that brought the Eastern and Western churches into doctrinal union— including Eastern acceptance of the doctrine of supremacy of the pope—the Muscovite bishops forcefully opposed such a measure. Russian hierarchs ultimately used their rejection of the union as a basis to end their subordination to Constantinople, creating in 1448 an autocephalous church.7 This brush with union strengthened rhetorical opposition to the Western Church and its ‘‘heretical’’ practices, in contrast to the ‘‘pure’’ practices of Orthodox Rus’.8 In this context, reacting to Constantinople’s dilemma of domination by the Muslim Turks and near submission to Rome in the mid-fifteenth century, Muscovite churchmen devised the ideology of the realm of Moscow as the ‘‘Third Rome,’’ which presented a messianic vision of Muscovy as the bulwark of the true and pure Orthodox Christian faith that stood firm against all heresy.9 Through the late sixteenth century Muscovite political and religious rhetoric overlapped in expositions on the righteousness of the Orthodox people in their victory over the ‘‘godless Mohammedan Tatars’’ as a reflection of God’s will and ultimately God’s favor toward the Russian people and their Orthodox religion.10 Once the Tatar threat from the East had dissipated, Muscovy turned its full attention to the West. The Lithuanians had been a persistent threat since the 22

The Irreparable Church Schism thirteenth century, but their dynastic union with Poland in 1386 colored their aggression with a Roman Catholic tinge. By the time Ivan IV (the Terrible) attempted to conquer a pathway to the Baltic Sea, the Muscovites were in conflict with the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (formed by a political union in 1569), whose dominant faith was Roman Catholicism, and whose armies under King Stephan Bathory ultimately reversed the gains of earlier Muscovites in a humiliating defeat. Consciousness of the church schism reasserted itself, and Russian rhetoric began to supplant the previous ‘‘infidel’’ Tatar enemy with the new Roman Catholic opponents, depicted equally as vile, equally as heretical. Muscovite chroniclers recorded the struggle of the Russian Orthodox armies, upright in faith and protected by God, battling against the Polish and Lithuanian followers of ‘‘lawless Latin heresies.’’11 Russian animosity toward its Roman Catholic neighbor peaked during the period known as the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), when invading Polish armies supporting a Polish Catholic pretender to the Muscovite throne brought an already weakened Muscovy into a state of virtual collapse. The Muscovites rallied under slogans that blended national pride with a religious crusade against the Roman Catholic Poles. Russian Orthodox leaders unleashed vitriolic rhetoric against the ‘‘heretical’’ Poles, deemed ‘‘followers of the Antichrist.’’ The defenders of Muscovy depicted Catholicism as a conglomeration of elements of all the heresies that had plagued the Christian Church since the beginning of the Christian era, including Judaism, Arianism, Manicheism, Mohammedism, and all that Christianity condemned.12 Muscovite chroniclers construed their final victory over the Poles as proof of God’s favor toward the true faith of the Orthodox Russians. As the seventeenth century progressed, the political landscape of northeastern Europe changed. The great power of the Polish-Lithuanian state, which had dominated this corner of Europe since the early fifteenth century, began to falter under ineffective political structures and aggression from its increasingly more powerful neighbors. One of these neighbors was a revived and strengthened Muscovy, which, under the Romanov rulers of the seventeenth century, began pressing westward again. By this time the Muscovite concern for upholding the Orthodox Church against the ‘‘heretical’’ Catholic Poles extended beyond the Muscovite borders to patronize the Orthodox population that lived within the eastern (Belarusian and Ukrainian) provinces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian religious enmity focused on a new target that directly threatened to undo Orthodoxy in the neighboring state: the Uniate Church. Against the setting of the sixteenth-century religious upheavals caused by the rise of Protestantism and the corresponding Catholic reform in Europe—both of which had dynamic repercussions in Poland—the Orthodox hierarchy in the Commonwealth also strove to reform their church. In 1596, in the name of reform, the majority of the Commonwealth’s Orthodox bishops approved the Union of Brest, which brought their Orthodox dioceses into communion with Rome 23

Barbara Skinner and created the so-called Uniate Church.13 The Uniates preserved the Eastern (Byzantine) Rite but accepted Roman Catholic doctrine, including that gravest of heresies from the Russian perspective—papal supremacy. From the Muscovite point of view, the Polish Catholics had intentionally led the Belarusian and Ukrainian Orthodox people from the path of the ‘‘true’’ faith and into ‘‘Roman heresy.’’ The Moscow patriarch declared the Uniates anathema, and anti-Uniate rhetoric permeated the increasingly anti-Catholic religious treatises published following the Time of Troubles.14 Not all the Commonwealth’s Orthodox population converted to the Uniate faith, however, and, in another transmutation of the original church schism, they divided into two opposing Orthodox and Uniate camps. This division contributed to contemporary political and social tensions in the eastern Commonwealth, particularly in Ukraine. Notably the powerful Zaporozhian Cossacks supported the Orthodox cause against the Uniates, and the bloody Cossack uprising of 1648 ultimately took up a religious program of protecting Orthodoxy against the spread of the Uniate faith that supplemented the overall political goals of the uprising. As the confrontation with the Poles escalated into a long and devastating war, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskii (Khmel’nyts’kyi) used his religious program as a powerful diplomatic card that played to the neighboring Muscovites’ enmity toward the Catholic Poles, requesting an alliance to fight for Orthodoxy against the Catholic Uniates and Poles. Khmelnytskii’s pronouncements to his Cossack followers and diplomatic correspondences to the Muscovites blamed the Poles for religious persecution against the Orthodox population of Ukraine: ‘‘[the Catholic Poles] have torn us from the Greek-Russian Orthodox faith of our fathers, and into pernicious Union and Roman errors, by force, violence, and many tortures of the Christian conscience.’’15 Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich entered the fight on the side of the Cossacks in the name of protecting the Orthodox faith. Certainly the Muscovites aimed for geopolitical gains and entered the Cossack fight only after gaining an oath of political allegiance from Khmelnytskii, but the defense of the Orthodox faith was the ‘‘ideological foundation’’ for the entry of Moscow into the Cossack war.16 Accordingly religious rhetoric permeated the declarations of the Muscovite union with the Cossacks in their fight against the Poles. As during the Time of Troubles, the Russian military campaign became a religious crusade to defend Orthodoxy against the ‘‘persecutions’’ of the Polish Catholics.17 After decades of fighting a losing battle, the Poles in the end ceded to Moscow the Ukrainian territory east of the Dnieper River with the city of Kyiv. The Muscovites proclaimed the territorial gains as a victory for Orthodoxy that spared this region of Ukraine further Roman Catholic and Uniate incursions. In the Russian Orthodox view, the creation of the Uniate Church was the most pernicious spawn of the Roman heresy to date. The Uniate Church, by absorbing formerly Orthodox Christians into the Roman fold, moved the boundaries of the original church schism eastward and directly challenged the 24

The Irreparable Church Schism position of the Russian Orthodox Church. Confirming Russian fears, the Uniate Church in the neighboring Commonwealth came to dominate the Belarusian and Ukrainian population through conversions from Orthodoxy over the next century. By 1750, only pockets of Orthodox communities survived in the Commonwealth. At the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772, there were some 4.7 million Uniates in the Polish-Lithuanian state and barely 400,000 Orthodox believers.18 After 1772, the Orthodox community there no longer had a resident bishop and became increasingly dependent on the Russian Orthodox Church for clergy, literature, funding, and their basic survival as a confession in the Commonwealth. Throughout the eighteenth century Russian rulers remained dedicated to the cause of protecting this weakening Orthodox community.19 They persistently petitioned the Polish kings to assist against the perceived ‘‘persecution’’ of the Orthodox from the Uniate and Catholic population, with language that displayed open enmity for the ‘‘papist’’ Uniates and their Polish Roman Catholic supporters.20 Furthermore, both Peter the Great during the Great Northern War and Catherine the Great during the war leading to the first partition of Poland took advantage of Russian military campaigns through Poland to commit numerous acts of violence against Uniate clergy, churches, and monasteries in attempts to recapture parishes for the Orthodox Church.21 The three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795 shifted Russia’s border some three hundred miles to the west to incorporate Belarusian and Ukrainian regions of the former Commonwealth. With the territorial gains, the Russian Empire acquired more than three million Uniate believers. The fault line between the Eastern and Western Churches now fell within Russian territory. As the partitions effectively carried the Uniate-Orthodox conflict inside Russia’s borders, Catherine II energetically engaged in pushing the fault line of the church schism back to her new western borders. In 1794, immediately following the second partition that gave Russia its largest share of Commonwealth territory, the empress began an aggressive crusade to convert the Uniates of the newly annexed territories to Russian Orthodoxy. Upon her death in late 1796, fully half the Uniate population in the Russian Empire—1.5 million (primarily in Right Bank Ukraine)—had officially converted to Orthodoxy, largely through methods of force.22 Significantly the official Russian justifications for the conversion campaign reiterated the same anti-Polish, anti-Catholic rhetoric that had become a familiar part of the ethos of the Russian Orthodox Church over the previous two centuries. Promoting Catherine’s policy to convert her new Uniate subjects to Orthodoxy, Russian Orthodox leaders began to drum into the Uniate population how unfortunate they had been under Polish rule and how the Russians were now saving them literally from the hands of the devil. Furthermore, the sense of righteousness of the religious policy accompanied a sense of righteousness of the Russian participation in the Polish partitions. Given the 25

Barbara Skinner history of this region as the site of important principalities in Kievan Rus’, which had adopted Orthodoxy from the earliest time of Prince Vladimir—and the heritage of which Russians believed to have passed to the Muscovite and later Russian imperial state—the land and its inhabitants were perceived as part of Russia’s historic and rightful patrimony. The concept of ‘‘recovering’’ these lands back into Russian rule and its inhabitants into the Orthodox Church was an important element in the official justification of the western expansion of the Russian Empire under Catherine II.23 In honor of the second partition, in which Russia gained the bulk of its territorial acquisitions from Poland, Catherine ordered a commemorative medal to be struck with a map of the annexed provinces and the inscription, ‘‘that which was torn asunder is returned.’’24 Just prior to signing the second partition in 1793, Catherine wrote to her future ambassador to Poland, General Igelstrom, ‘‘There is no need to present the reasons compelling us to unite to our state the lands that, having become part of the Polish republic, belonged in antiquity to Russia, where the cities were built by Russian princes and the population descends from the same tribe as the Russians and are also of our same faith.’’25 The words ‘‘also of the same faith’’ precisely reveal Catherine’s position on the Uniate Church. In a word it lacked legitimacy, and therefore Uniate believers were still at heart Orthodox who had gone astray. The Belarusian and Ukrainian conversion to the Uniate Church was an error committed by innocents subjected to ‘‘expansionist’’ policies of the Polish Roman Catholics; it was a simple detour from their true faith that could and should be rectified.26 Accordingly Catherine approached the Uniate conversion back to Orthodoxy not as conversion per se, but as an act of undoing the religious damage of Polish rule and reclaiming the historical religious tradition of Orthodoxy. Her decree of April 1794 that initiated the campaign to make the Uniates convert to Orthodoxy bluntly called for expedited efforts ‘‘toward the most suitable eradication of the Uniate faith (k udobneishemu iskoreneniiu Unii).’’27 Likewise the April 1794 pastoral decree drafted by the Holy Synod for Orthodox Archbishop Viktor (Sadkovskii) of Minsk to inaugurate the conversion campaign opened with a severe censure of the Ukrainian and Belarusian experience under Polish rule: It is known to everyone that during the troubled times of Russia a great part of its subjects who confessed the Greek Orthodox faith, being under the Polish yoke [pod igo Pol’skoe] torn from their true [political] body, soon through sorrowful experiences witnessed the greatest oppression in the free worship of their faith. Everything that only flattery could invent was used in turning the sons of the church of Christ from the true path: when these desirable means had no success, then the most torturous force was used so that those who had held on to Orthodoxy would be forced into Union with the Latins. But the inscrutable will of the Most High put an end to the suffering of these people who were raised in the embrace of Christian Orthodoxy and for the same Orthodoxy were so cruelly persecuted by the

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The Irreparable Church Schism Poles. By the Right Hand of the Almighty, this people [narod] has today been wrested from the foreign hand and returned to the gentle Scepter of its true Sovereign. Her Most Holy Majesty, Most Orthodox Sovereign [Gosudarynia], Empress Catherine the Second, the Patroness of the Orthodox Church, having returned to Her Reign this people of the same tribe, and thinking not only of its temporary but its eternal well-being, allowed the creation of a religious authority for this flock and has selected Us for this service. Fulfilling our duty as a pastor, to whom is entrusted unceasing care for the salvation of human souls, and fulfilling the will of our Anointed Sovereign, we invite by the word of the Gospel everyone . . . to return fearlessly to the embrace of the Eastern Orthodox Church. . . . The persecution has gone, the storm has passed. Hurry to come into the embrace of our mother church, and delight in a calm conscience, walk in the path of truth, leading you to a state of grace and glory.28

Russian documents supporting the Uniate conversion effort consistently reiterated this argument that the second partition and conversion to Orthodoxy ‘‘saved’’ the population from previous Polish ‘‘persecution.’’ Defiant language about religious conversion, however, only thinly disguised Russian anxieties over the cultural and political consequences of incorporating a former piece of Poland into the Russian Empire. That the Uniate Church had created not only a religious bridge to the Western Church but also a cultural bridge that brought the vast majority of the Belarusian and Ukrainian population in the Commonwealth into closer understanding with the Polish political and intellectual perspectives no doubt influenced the Russian decision to eliminate this church. Indeed, four centuries of Polish and Lithuanian rule had created a tangible cultural schism between the Belarusians and Ukrainians of the Commonwealth and the Russians of the Russian Empire. In one political tradition, central and local noble assemblies circumscribed monarchical authority; in the other, the tsar held autocratic power. In one cultural/intellectual setting, classical education of European university tradition blended with rationalist civil theories of the age of reason; in the other, universities and secular literature were in their infancy. Furthermore, by the late eighteenth century, the Uniate Church had fully integrated Roman Catholic moral theology, which incorporated Western legal norms and concepts into its standard training for parish priests. In this way, the Uniate priests at the broad parish level served as a conduit for Western European concepts of natural law, legal rights, and due process, including the sanctity of contracts, with a focus on the individual.29 In comparison, the leading Russian Orthodox catechism of the eighteenth century was notable in its promotion of obedience to the tsar and his imperial officials, with a focus on the well-being of the state.30 This intellectual and cultural orientation of the Uniate Church posed the greatest concern just at the time of the second partition, when political defiance and insurrection ignited neighboring Poland. By the 1790s, Cather-

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Barbara Skinner ine II sought to restrict the penetration into her realm of ‘‘dangerous tendencies’’ brewing in Western Europe, where the French Revolution threatened to undermine all sources of traditional authority. In 1791, when the Poles independently issued their May 3 Constitution in violation of political agreements with Russia, Russian officials accused the Polish citizens of ‘‘imitating the godless, frenzied, and corrupted throng of French rebels in the kingdom of France.’’31 Imperial fears peaked after the second partition when the explosive Ko´sciuszko uprising broke out in 1794. Hundreds of new Russian subjects from the recently annexed Ukrainian and Belarusian provinces fled to assist with the cause of the uprising in Poland. The prosecuting decree for those accused of participating in the uprising reveals the extreme Russian anxieties about preserving order within the empire in the face of perceived Polish anarchy. During the outbreak of rebellion in Poland . . . many took part [in the uprising] who were Our new subjects, inhabitants of the ancient Russian provinces returned to Our Empire. Inflamed by the violent spirit of anarchy and by the enemies of all order, they entered into a hateful and villainous enterprise that committed them against Us and Our State as oath-breakers and inciters of rebellion.32

Since the Uniates had taken up Roman Catholic teachings and developed within the political infrastructure of the Polish Commonwealth, they had, in the Russian view, abandoned their Eastern Slavic roots and culturally become Poles. The dominant fear was that they had politically become Poles as well. The crisis of the Ko´sciuszko uprising in Poland against the Russians (begun in late March 1794) was the setting for the massive conversion efforts in the second-partition lands (begun in late April 1794). Logically, returning the new Uniate subjects of the Russian Empire to the Orthodox fold—back to the Eastern side of the schism—was considered a political necessity at this time. The goal behind imposing this religious conversion, then, was to implement a cultural shift among the large Uniate population of the Russian Empire away from the troublesome Western norms cultivated by the Poles, thus bringing added political coherence to the Russian Empire. The 1794 decree inaugurating mass conversions to Orthodoxy stated that converting the Uniates was ‘‘the most reliable means for confirming the people of those regions in unanimity (edinomyslii) and in tranquility.’’33 Simply put, Catherine’s efforts to convert the large Uniate community in her empire aimed at purging Polish cultural and political influences from the non-Polish, Eastern Slavic population of the Belarusian and Ukrainian provinces. While Catherine’s active efforts to convert Uniates stopped with her death in late 1796, the nationalistic reign of Nicholas I revived her policy. In the context of the Official Nationality doctrine and as part of the aftermath of the 1830–31 Polish uprising, the ‘‘Iron Tsar’’ oversaw the mass conversion of

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The Irreparable Church Schism Belarusian Uniates to Orthodoxy in 1839. Finally, in the wake of the 1863 Polish uprising, the remaining Uniates of Kholm [Che™m] Province officially converted under government pressure to Russian Orthodoxy in 1875.34 Each stage of the conversions provoked a certain level of resistance, and a number Uniate priests continued to perform their rites for believers in secret; official documents, however, proclaimed the full triumph of Orthodoxy. Throughout the nineteenth century, with the strengthening of Russian nationalism, the anti-Polish argumentation originating from the time of the partitions of Poland and the Uniate conversions under Catherine II persisted in Russian historical and official literature.35 Russian imperial historians developed the myth of the happy ‘‘reunion’’ (vozsoedinenie) of the Ukrainian and Belarusian population in the provinces of ‘‘West Russia’’—the official term adopted to refer to the lands annexed from Poland. This term and the viewpoint behind it negated the significance of the four centuries of Polish rule in these provinces, presenting their previous status within the Polish-Lithuanian state— and the concomitant spread of the Uniate Church there—as illegitimate. Particularly following the Polish uprising of 1863, after which the Russians introduced serious measures to Russify the Polish population in the empire, Russian invectives against the Poles and their perceived detrimental influence on the Belarusian and Ukrainian people reached new heights. Official documentation during the continued conversions of Uniates to Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century fully elaborated the view of Uniatism as an attack on Russian nationality and identity with the goal of ‘‘complete Polonization’’ of the Eastern Slavs. In the words of the conciliar act drafted for the Kholm Uniate clergy upon their conversion to Orthodoxy in 1875, However cleverly thought out were the measures to capture the Western Russian people in the net of Roman domination and Polonization, the people already in the first decades of confronting Union guessed the underlying mission of the unfolding events: in union with Rome, the people saw not only subordination to the Roman Bishop, but encroachment on the purity of the Eastern faith, the foundation of their national life; the people understood that Union was not only a matter of religious confession, but was directed toward a complete swallowing up of the Russians [poglashchenie russkikh] and the destruction of their very name, that the conversion to Union implied a transition to Catholicism, and then to full and complete Polonization.36

Writers and historians accordingly sought to excoriate the Uniate Church as the instrument devised by the Polish Catholics to implement their attack on the Russian nation and culture, thereby depriving the Belarusian and Ukrainian people in ‘‘West Russia’’ of their true Russian roots. The famous OberProcurator of the Holy Synod at the end of the nineteenth century, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wrote in his history of the region that the Union of Brest ‘‘was an artificially built bridge upon which the Orthodox people could be brought

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Barbara Skinner into pure Catholicism and the Russian nationality could be Polonized.’’37 Another historian from the same period, F. I. Titov, entitled his history of the Uniate-Orthodox struggle in Belarus and Ukraine Western Russia in Its Fight for Faith and Nationality in the 17th–18th Centuries. According to Titov, This was precisely a fight between two nationalities in which the PolishCatholic nationality was the offensive and persecuting side, and the Orthodox Russian nationality the deflecting and defensive side, and [the fight] is viewed here also from the two sides: first, from the point of view of those means that the Latin-Uniates used to subjugate and even to destroy completely the Orthodox faith and the Russian nationality in Western Russia, and, second, from the point of view of those means and methods with which the Western Russians tried to retain its faith and nationality.38

Perceptions of an aggressive Catholic Poland striking at the core values of Orthodox Russian nationality culminated in these descriptions of ‘‘West Russia’’ as a battleground between the Eastern and Western churches and cultures. Through the centuries, then, Russian religious and cultural animosity toward Polish Catholic culture and tradition has provided a sharply bipolar perspective of Russian-Polish relations—an ‘‘us’’ versus ‘‘them’’ mentality that allowed for no gray area, no church union. Blended into this religious perspective was an ethnic argument that was also strictly bipolar, delineating Eastern and Western Slavs according to their faith and cultural tradition. According to this view, Belarusians and Ukrainians, as Eastern Slavs, belonged in the Eastern Church; Catholicizing Eastern Slavs through the Uniate Church was tantamount to Polonizing them, which was a gross violation of their Eastern Slav heritage. Indeed, Russian nationalists had come to consider the cultural integrity of the Eastern Slavs in the Orthodox tradition as essential to the security of Russian national identity. Expansion of Catholicism in any form was perceived as an assault on Russia’s cultural leadership in the Eastern Slavic world. Today, as Russia has reclaimed its Orthodox identity in the post-communist world, it has also reclaimed its anti-Catholic posture, evident in the rhetorical outbursts opposing the recent visit of Pope John Paul II to Ukraine. The historical consciousness of the newly revived Russian Orthodox Church reaches back a millennium to the original church schism, which modern church publications still cite to explain (and often to promote) a history of hostility toward Catholicism.39 The buffer zone of Ukraine is now the primary setting of the contemporary religious conflict. Here, the most recent ‘‘reunion’’ of Uniates occurred after the Soviet Union seized Western Ukraine during World War II; the Greek Catholic Church that had survived in the Austrian partition and become a voice for Ukrainian nationalism was brutally suppressed by the Soviets. Many in this Greek Catholic community continued to practice underground, and they reemerged several million strong in the late 1980s during the religious revival of Gorbachev’s regime. Their presence and

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The Irreparable Church Schism their claims on churches that came under Orthodox control after 1946 are a primary source of tension between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican today. While the sharply anti-Polish associations with anti-Uniatism have receded, the Russian-Polish origins of the conflict there remain in the historical memory. The long and contentious Russian encounter with the powerful Catholic Polish-Lithuanian state and—following the absorption of Belarusian and Ukrainian lands through partition—the determined policy of undoing the ‘‘Polonization’’ of the Eastern Slavs in these lands is the struggle to which the Russian Orthodox Church has returned after the fall of communism. The religious fault line between the Eastern and Western churches once more lies outside Russia’s borders in Ukraine, and once again the Russian Orthodox Church has taken up the role of defender of the Eastern faith there. At stake is the cultural identity of a newly independent Ukraine still struggling with a national consciousness that holds both Eastern and Western traditions dear. Pouring in funds and support for the Ukrainian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and communities under its jurisdiction, and assisting with publications that disseminate its position, the Russian Orthodox Church once again strives to promote an Eastern Slavic identity in Ukraine that is free from Western ‘‘error.’’ NOTES Research for this article was assisted in part by grants from the Fulbright Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Program (administered by the U.S. Department of Education) and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State through the Title VIII Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1. See, for example, Alessandra Stanley, ‘‘Pope Finds a Hard Road to Ending Rift in Ukraine: Orthodox Church in Effect Boycotts Visit,’’ New York Times, June 25, 2001. During my stay in Kyiv in the weeks prior to the pope’s visit, Orthodox communities of the Moscow patriarchate sponsored holy processions (krestnye khody) to protest the upcoming visit. 2. Bruce Johnston and Reuters, ‘‘Putin Does Not Rule Out Papal Visit to Moscow,’’ Daily Telegraph (London), June 7, 2000. News reports from a variety of sources, including Agence France Presse and the Russian news agencies, Interfax and ITARTASS, June 3–7, 2000, also cited this response. 3. ‘‘Russian Patriarch Believes Papal Visit to Ukraine Will Widen Differences,’’ ITAR-TASS News Agency, Moscow, June 4, 2001. 4. For sound background on the schism and its cultural/political manifestations, see Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin, 1997) and Alexander Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, trans. Lydia W. Kesich (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). 5. See Andrei Popov, Istoriko-literaturnyi obzor drevne-russkikh polemicheskikh sochinenii protiv latinian (XI–XV v.) (Moscow: Tip. T. Ris’, 1875; reprinted in London: Variorum Reprints, 1972). Popov notes the circulation of Greek polemics against Latin

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Barbara Skinner Church practices since the time of the conversion of the Rus’ in the tenth century and the presence of Church Slavonic translations of such tracts beginning in the eleventh century. The polemical language became more sharply antagonistic and detailed following the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The presence of such polemical treatises within important texts of Russian Orthodoxy can be noted, for example, in the thirteenth-century Kormchaia kniga of Riazan, Novgorod, and Volhynia (Popov, Istoriko-literaturnyi obzor, 122–33). 6. See, for example, the fifteenth-century text ‘‘Povesti o zhitii i o khrabrosti blagovernago i velikago kniazia Aleksandra,’’ Pskovskie letopisi, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1955), 11–16, with its description of victory over the ‘‘bezbozhnykh’’ Germans and of Prince Alexander’s rejecting the teachings of the Latin Church to papal envoys. Of interest, John Fennell noted little penetration of anti-Latin sentiment in Kievan Rus’ among the ruling class until the rise of the formidable Lithuanian power in the West and the Teutonic Knights in the era of Alexander Nevskii. See John Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (New York: Longman, 1995), 96–104. According to Popov, it is precisely the late thirteenth century that began to yield more anti-Latin texts in Church Slavonic (Popov, Istoriko-literaturnyi obzor). 7. The most common accounts note that, upon returning to Moscow after nominally joining the union, the Russian metropolitan Isidore (a Greek) was arrested, imprisoned, and deposed. Fennell notes the murkiness of the facts as recorded in the chronicles (History of the Russian Church, 183–88). Nevertheless, the anti-Roman stance of the chroniclers is consistent (as pointed out in Fennell’s account). It should be mentioned that the union failed to be enforced among the Greeks as well. For a brief account, see Ware, The Orthodox Church, 70–72. 8. Popov observes that the reaction to the ill-fated Union of Florence produced the first self-made Muscovite polemics against the Latin Church (texts cited in Istorikoliteraturnyi obzor, 336–44). Notably this sharp condemnation of the Union of Florence in Muscovite texts was absent in texts from southwestern Rus’, highlighting the increasingly different attitudes between Muscovite churchmen and those of Lithuanian/ Polish Rus’ (ibid., 328–29). 9. The ideology contended that the guardian of the pure Christian faith passed from Rome, which fell to the papal heresy, to Constantinople, which fell under Muslim control, and then to Moscow, or the Russian realm. Namely, Muscovy was seen as the guardian of all Christendom, with ‘‘Rome’’ designating the Christian kingdom on earth. Scholars have successfully argued that the Third Rome ideology was not a major factor in the political ideology of an expanding Muscovy; see, for example, Daniel B. Rowland, ‘‘Moscow: The Third Rome or the New Israel?’’ Russian Review 55, no. 4 (October 1996): 591–614; and Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: CrossCultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 10. Nevertheless, the development of an ideological framework that raised the Russian Orthodox Church above the other Christian churches of the age remains significant as a religious argument and must be taken seriously as an expression of the Russian Church’s ethos. The language used in ‘‘The Tale of the White Cowl,’’ a sixteenth-century representation of the Third Rome ideology, was especially hostile toward the Roman Church, claiming that the Latin king and pope embraced heresy and schism from the true Orthodox Church by following the false teachings of the devil himself; the pope is described as foul, immoral, deceitful, and evil. See the excerpted ‘‘Povest’ o Novgorodskom belom klobuke,’’ in Nikolai Kallinikovich Gudzii,

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The Irreparable Church Schism ed., Khrestomatiia po drevnei russkoi literature XI–XVII vekov (Moscow: Gos. uchebnopedagog. Izd-vo, 1947), 228–37. 10. This argument is convincingly developed in Jaroslaw Pelenski, Russia and Kazan: Conquest and Imperial Ideology (1438–1560s) (Paris: Mouton, 1974). 11. Povest’ o prikhozhenii Stefana Batoriia na grad Pskov, ed. V. I. Malyshev (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952), 71–72. 12. Tatiana Oparina, ‘‘Spryiniattia unii v Rosii XVII stolittia,’’ in Derzhava, suspil’stvo i Tserkva v Ukraini u XVII stolitti. Materialy Druhykh ‘‘Beresteis’skykh chytan’.’’ L’viv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Kyiv, 1–6 liutoho 1995 r., ed. Borys Gudziak and Oleh Turii (Lviv: Instytut istoriï ‘‘T’Serkvy L’vivs’koï bohoslovs’koï akademiï, 1996), 132–37. Decrees from the new Romanov tsar and the zemskii sobor to proclaim the peace settlements with Poland and Sweden were filled with such vilifications of the Roman faith, while extolling the virtues of the Orthodox Church and its people. See Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov khraniashchikhsia v Gosudarstvennoi kollegii inostrannykh del, part 3 (Moscow, 1822). 13. For an insightful recent analysis of the context for the development of the Uniate Church, see Borys Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 14. Oparina, ‘‘Spryiniattia unii v Rosii,’’ 138–49, reveals that while the Time of Troubles distracted Muscovy from the Uniate issue, Filaret’s tenure as metropolitan (from 1613) saw an escalation of publications that denounced the Uniate faith as part of a perceived Polish/papal onslaught against Russia. Prominent among the treatises circulating in Muscovy in the first half of the seventeenth century was Eresi rimskie (Roman heresies) by Stefan Zizanii, whose writings made a significant contribution to the Orthodox polemics against Union with Rome in the Commonwealth at this time. Notably much of the antipapal arguments of the seventeenth-century Orthodox polemicists in the Commonwealth drew heavily on the language of antipapal Protestant polemical literature. 15. ‘‘Universal getmana voiska Zaporozhskago Bogdana Khmel’nitskago zhiteliam Malorossiiskoi Ukrainy i kozakam . . .,’’ May 28, 1648, in Dokumenty, ob’’iasniaiushchie istoriiu zapadno-russkago kraia i ego otnosheniia k Rossii i k Pol’she (St. Petersburg, 1865), 316–18. For a solid summary of the role of religion in the Khmelnytskii uprising, see O. P. Kryzhanivs’kyi and S. M. Plokhii, Istoriia tserkvy ta religiinoi dumky v Ukraini. Knyga 3: kinets’ XVI—seredyna XIX stolittia (Kyiv, 1994), 70–81. For an in-depth analysis, see Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 16. Oparina, ‘‘Spryiniattia unii v Rosii,’’ 153–54. In an effort to streamline my argument about the Russian perceptions, I omit many of the complexities of the Khmelnytskii era and its use of Orthodoxy as a rallying cause in Ukraine. 17. See the diplomatic correspondence between the Cossacks and Muscovy during the time of the Pereiaslav union in L.V. Zaborovskii, Katoliki, Pravoslavnye, Uniaty. Problemy religii v russko-pol’sko-ukrainskikh otnosheniiakh kontsa 40-x–80-x gg. XVII v. Dokumenty, issledovaniia. Chast’ 1: Istochniki vremeni getmanstva B.M. Khmel’nitskogo (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli , 1998). 18. Witold Ko™buk, Ko´scio™y wschodnie w Rzeczypospolitej oko™o 1772 roku (Lublin: Instytut Europy *Srodkowo-Wschodniej, 1998), 72–73. 19. The Russians had created a legal basis for interference in religious matters in

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Barbara Skinner the Commonwealth concerning the Orthodox population by stipulating in the 1686 peace treaty with Poland that ‘‘no oppression, and no forced conversions to the Roman or Uniate faiths’’ occur among the Orthodox population of the Commonwealth (Article IX, Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686). For the full text of the treaty, see Volumina Legum, vol. 6, ed. Jozafat Ohryzko (St. Petersburg, 1859). 20. Copies of letters to this effect during the reigns of Peter I, Catherine I, and Anna Ioannovna are found in Sbornik dokumentov, uiasniaiushchikh otnosheniia Latino-Polskoi propagandy k russkoi vere i narodnosti, Part 2 (Vilna, 1865), Documents 27, 30, 36, 42, 44, 45. Similar letters from Elizabeth’s reign are published in Arkhiv iugo-zapadnoi Rossii, Chast’ I, Tom 4: Akty ob Unii i sostoianii pravoslavnoi Tserkvi s poloviny XVII veka (1648–1798) (Kiev, 1871), 444–57 (documents 195–98, written 1743–44). 21. For a description of Peter’s attacks on Uniate churches and monasteries, see Aleksy Deruga, Piotr Wielki a Unici i Unja ko´scilna, 1700–1711 (Wilno, 1936). On the Russian attacks on Uniate parishes during the time of the war leading to the first partition (1772–73), the most important primary sources found to date are descriptions by priests and village leaders preserved in the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), f. 823, op. 2, d. 2116. For a detailed study on Catherine’s policies toward the Uniates throughout her reign, see my dissertation, ‘‘The Empress and the Heretics: Catherine II’s Challenge to the Uniate Church, 1762–1796,’’ Georgetown University, 2001. 22. Reports and documentation on the 1794–96 conversions have been published in late-nineteenth-century volumes of Eparkhial’nyia vedomosti for Podolskaia, Bratslavskaia, Kievskaia, and Volynskaia eparkhies, for example: ‘‘Materialy dlia istorii vozsoedineniia zhitelei iugo-zapadnago kraia s pravoslavnoiu tserkov’iu iz Unii,’’ Kievskiia eparkhial’nyia vedomosti, 1891, no. 2: 38–44; no. 3: 51–58; and ‘‘Vozsoedinenie uniiatov na Volyni v 1794–95 godakh po dokumentam Volynskoi Dukhovnoi Konsistorii za 1795 god,’’ Volynskiia eparkhial’nyia vedomosti, 1880, no. 26: 1167–78; no. 27: 1215– 28. The most important secondary sources on this topic are Edward Likowski, Dzieje koscio™a Unickiego na Litwie i Rusi w XVIII i XIX wieku, Vol. 1 (Poznan, ´ 1880); and Mikhail Koialovich, Istoriia vozsoedineniia zapadnorusskikh Uniatov starykh vremen (do 1800g.) (St. Petersburg, 1873). 23. A scrap of paper tucked into the personal files of Catherine II cites sources dating back to the eleventh century—the era of the church schism—that marked the ‘‘ancient frontiers’’ of Russia to include the provinces of Minsk, Novogrodek, Grodno, Volynia, Kiev, Podolia, and Bratslav. Sources included Gallus and Stryjkowski, RGADA, f. 10, Kabinet Ekateriny II, d. 10 (Sobstvennoruchniia zapiski i primechaniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II po delam Pol’shi), l. 35. 24. Pompei Nikolaevich Batiushkov, Belorussiia i Litva. Istoricheskiia sud’by Severo-Zapadnago kraia (St. Petersburg, 1890), 312. Both sides of the medal are reproduced in Batiushkov’s Volyn. Istoricheskiia sud’by iugo-zapadnago kraia (St. Petersburg, 1888), 236–37. On the front is a profile portrait of Catherine II with the inscription, ‘‘Her Majesty Catherine II Empress and Autocrat of All Russia,’’ and, on the back, the double-headed eagle holding two parts of a map—one marked 1772 with the firstpartition provinces and one marked 1793 with the second-partition provinces—with the inscription ottorzhennaia vozvratikh. 25. Nikolai Kostomarov, Poslednye gody Rechi pospolitoi (1787–1795) (St. Petersburg, 1868), 541. (Igelstrom replaced Jakov Sievers as ambassador to Poland the following year.)

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The Irreparable Church Schism 26. Catherine subscribed to the views of the notoriously anti-Catholic and antiUniate Orthodox Bishop of Mohylew (Mogilev), Georgii Koniski, who appealed to her on the day of her coronation to protect the Orthodox of the Commonwealth and from that time forward influenced her views on the Uniates. See his ‘‘Slovo pri osviashchenii tserkvi, vozvrashchennoi iz unii v pravoslavie,’’ Sobranie sochinenii Georgiia Koniskago, arkhiepiskopa Belorusskago, Chast’ 2 (St. Petersburg, 1835), 100–106. 27. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 1830–84), vol. 23, no. 17,199, April 22, 1794 (hereafter, PSZ): ‘‘Ob ustranenii vsiakikh prepiatstvii k obrashcheniiu Uniatov k Pravoslavnoi Grecheskoi Tserkvi.’’ 28. Ibid. 29. Some of the most widely used handbooks of moral theology for Uniate parish priests were Leon Kiszka, Now Ro´znych Przypadkow, z Pe™ni Doktorow Theologii Moralney ziawiony. To iest: Kazusy Ruskiemu Duchowienstwu ´ (Lublin, 1693); and J. Narolski, Teologia Moralna albo Do Obyczajow Sciagai ˛ aca ˛ si˛e przez Pewnego Bazyliana Kap™ana Prowincyi Litewski zebrana na dwie cz˛esci podzielona (Vilnius, 1777). 30. Feofan Prokopovich, Pervoe uchenie otrokom v nemzhe bukvy i slogi. Tazhe: Kratkoe tolkovanie Zakonago Desiatosloviia, Molitvy Gospodni, Simvola Very, i deviati Blazhenstv (St. Petersburg, 1720). (Translated into English as The Russian Catechism, Composed and Published by the Order of the Czar, to which is annexed a Short Account of the Church-Government, and Ceremonies, of the Muscovites [London, 1723]). This catechism was widely used in Russia in multiple reprints through the entire eighteenth century as an essential part of Peter I’s program to subordinate the church to the state. For a solid study on the processes involved in Peter’s church reforms, see James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (London, 1971). Prokopovich’s catechism emphasized throughout the concept of serving and respecting the tsar and his officials. Certainly such instruction was absent in previous Orthodox catechisms used in both the Commonwealth and Russia (notably the catechism of Peter Mohyla, 1640, recently republished as Katekhyzys Petra Mogyly [Kiev, 1996]). Uniate conversions to Orthodoxy in the post-Petrine Russian Empire, then, were conversions to a Russian Orthodoxy that promoted Prokopovich’s directives stressing obedience to the autocratic regime. 31. PSZ, vol. 23, no. 17,108, March 27, 1793: ‘‘Manifest general-anshefa Krechetnikova . . . o prisoedinineii Pol’skikh oblastei k Rossii.’’ 32. PSZ, vol. 23, no. 17,345, June 20, 1795: ‘‘O nakazanii uchastvovavshikh v Pol’skom miatezhe.’’ 33. PSZ, vol. 23, no. 17,199, April 22, 1794. 34. For an overview of the Russian stance in promoting the nineteenth-century conversions, see Theodore R. Weeks, ‘‘Between Rome and Tsargrad: The Uniate Church in Imperial Russia,’’ in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 70–91. (Weeks fails, however, to note the eighteenth-century conversion effort.) For a more detailed investigation of the 1875 conversion, see Weeks, ‘‘The ‘End’ of the Uniate Church in Russia: The Vozsoedinenie of 1875,’’ Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 1 (1996): 28–39. 35. Within the sphere of an expanding intelligentsia, this era also generated the Slavophile movement, which embraced basic concepts of harmony and sobornost ’ of the Orthodox Church and condemned the Roman Catholic heritage of the West. 36. ‘‘Sobornyi akt Kholmskago dukhovenstva,’’ Volynskiia Eparkhial’nyia Vedo-

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Barbara Skinner mosti, no. 9 (1875): 382–94, quote at 384–85. This perspective and terminology was also repeated in the decrees that pronounced the mass conversion of Uniates in 1839. See ‘‘Postanovlenie Polotskago sobora,’’ February 12, 1839, as published in the annex to Ivan Malyshevskii, Pravda ob Unii k pravoslavnym khristianam (St. Petersburg, 1889), 48–49. 37. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Istoricheskaia zapiska o Khomskoi Rusi i g. Kholme, o sud’bakh unii v Khomskom krae i sovremennom polozhenii v nem uniatskago voprosa (St. Petersburg, 1897), 15. 38. F. I. Titov, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ v pol’sko-litovskom gosudarstve v XVII–XVIII vv. Tom 1: Zapadnaia Rus’ v bor’be za veru i narodnost’ v XVII–XVIII vv. (1654–1761g.) (Kiev, 1905), vii. Titov dedicated this book to Ober-Procurator Pobedonostsev. The title of this book repeated exactly the title of a similar study published a few years earlier: I. I. Malyshevskii, Zapadnaia Rus’ v bor’be za veru i narodnost’ (St. Petersburg, 1897). 39. The Orthodox mission newspaper SOS sponsored by the Moscow patriarchate in Ukraine (published in Dnepropetrovsk), for example, published an article entitled ‘‘Katoliki uzhe davno predali nas anafeme’’ (The Catholics long ago condemned us to anathema) in its fourth issue in 2001 (at the time of the pope’s visit) that referred repeatedly to the 1054 schism and the dogmatic ‘‘errors’’ upheld by the Catholics from that time forward. The same issue ran a column that quoted Father Ioann of Kronstadt’s condemnation of Roman Catholicism, including the statement, ‘‘Hatred of Orthodoxy, fanaticism and persecution of Orthodox, and murder—all run as a red thread through the centuries of Catholic history.’’ In a more formal publication (available for purchase at the Pochaev Monastery, which is under the jurisdiction of the Moscow patriarchate), Sovremennye eresi i sekty na rusi, 2nd ed. (Zhytomyr, 2001), edited by St. Petersburg and Ladozhskii Metropolitan Ioann, begins its description of churches that have asserted ‘‘spiritual aggression against Rus’ ’’ with an account of the Roman Catholic Church and the components of its ‘‘false dogma.’’

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Beth Holmgren If we read her as her Journals guardedly construct her, Durova discovered in the army a manageable mode of being in the world for, cross-dressed as a male cavalry officer, she ‘‘travelled with security, socialized freely, [and] found comradeship and acceptance.’’3 Her army service afforded her all the freedoms and opportunities of an upper-class male’s social identity, as well as insulating her, a perpetual guest, from the domestic obligations and messy intimacy of civilian life. A ‘‘guest’’ may designate a family friend, visiting dignitary, paying patron, or obligatory charge, yet all these examples presume a limited and ritualized interaction between host and guest, a mutual masking which at once privileges and infantilizes the latter. Accepted quite literally at face value, the guest enjoys definite advantages (greater consideration, finer food, etc.) over the ‘‘stay-at-homes,’’ including vicarious or voyeuristic involvement with the hosts, but the guest remains detached and ultimately is expected to leave, to cultivate his or her life elsewhere. As guest, Durova was well camouflaged by such detachment, and she derived great childish pleasure (the only sort she professed to desire) from her pampering. Moreover, as her Journals interestingly trace, the act of being ‘‘herself ’’—off duty and on her own—became an increasingly complicated and elusive prospect. For the closeted and conformist Durova, imitating an officer guest most closely approximated a happy, normal life. Durova’s accommodations, typical of a tsarist army officer in the early nineteenth century, ranged from the superlative comforts of Holstein to the gravelly bread and grudging service of the ‘‘poor, pale, gaunt, and dispirited’’ Lithuanians (33). According to her Journals, however, she spent most of her army life fraternizing with Polish officers and visiting Polish families. Although Poland had lost its sovereignty to the occupying empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary a mere decade before Durova’s 1806 enlistment, the Poles depicted in her Journals display no antagonism toward their Russian peers.4 Durova associates exclusively with Poles who serve the tsar.5 She lists minor anti-Polish grievances—a distaste for the Polish language, irritation with a colonel of the Polish militia (ruchawka) who lures away her unit’s hussars—yet the great, ill-fated allegiance between the rebellious Poles and a supportive Bonaparte simply does not register in her text. Rather, Durova, an ardent Russian patriot, myopically treats Polish officers as good fellows in a heterogeneous tsarist army and meets Polish civilians as colorful characters or welcome friends. Indeed, it is largely through her experiences as an officer guest in Polish households that Durova locates a happy home away from home and cobbles together a conforming, ‘‘normal’’ identity as tsarist officer. The various Polish types she handily recognizes—hospitable Poles, romantic Poles—school her in her own quite conventional imitation of life.

Compensatory Boyhood In the frame memoir ‘‘Childhood Years’’ that she retroactively fits to her Journals, Durova hyperbolizes the ‘‘facts’’ of her unhappy parentage, thus 38

Imitation of Life arguing the ‘‘naturalness’’ of her ‘‘unnatural’’ vocation and itinerant life. As Barbara Heldt observes, ‘‘from the outset all her self-descriptions are teleological: she was made by nature to be a man, a military man.’’6 Her melodramatic plotting of her parents’ marriage and her early years hinge on thwarted expectations—her half-Ukrainian mother elopes with a Russian officer against her father’s wishes, and the son for whom her mother longs as a means to family reconciliation is born ‘‘a bogatyr of a daughter.’’ Her mother’s outrageous rejection (she flings her bawling baby from her carriage) eventuates in Durova’s early upbringing by her father’s flank hussar. Durova is born not to be girl and to flourish instead as ‘‘the living image’’ of her military father (8). The hyperromantic Gothic effects Mary Zirin discerns in Durova’s fiction here serve to demonize her mother (Durova howls at the sight of her mother’s room) and a ‘‘woman’s lot’’ of ‘‘eternal bondage, painful dependence, and repression of every sort’’ (8). Durova thus pleads the inevitability and satisfaction of ‘‘uniforming’’ herself as a military man. Durova does enjoy a fleeting ‘‘boyhood’’ outfitted with military toys before her mother reinstates her alienating control: ‘‘My tutor Astakhov carried me around all day, taking me into the squadron stables and sitting me on the horses, giving me a pistol to play with, and brandishing his saber while I clapped my hands and laughed out loud at the sight of the scattering sparks and glittering steel’’ (3). But her mother’s bleak role model and her father’s guilty passivity force her from home to improvise her own variations on happy father-son relationships outside of it. Durova discovers paternal and parental surrogates throughout her travels, beginning with the Cossack colonel who recruits her and culminating in her audiences with Tsar Alexander I, who, as ‘‘the adored Father of Russia,’’ bestows on Durova his name, the Cross of St. George, and funds for her service (62–66). By the time she pays her first visit to a Polish family, the uncle and aunt of her comrade-in-arms Wyszemirski, Durova has grown more assured in her assumed role of surrogate son, with the presence of mind to remark at the willful girl in the household, to respond graciously to her hosts’ queries about her background, to entertain them with her modest talents (she leaves them her quick sketch of ‘‘Andromeda on the cliff ’’), and to relish the praise of ‘‘people who have come to love [her] like a son’’ (36). Her performance is so successful as to arouse Wyszemirski’s jealousy: ‘‘Why did I go to see them? Strangers are dearer to them than family! They were occupied only with you, and I might as well have not been there at all. What good are relations like that!’’ (36). The disguised Durova now willingly avails herself of her Polish hosts’ extravagant hospitality. As this recorded episode plainly documents, once Durova successfully impersonates a good son, she is rewarded with a ‘‘holiday’’ of parental love and indulgence, a compensatory boyhood. Thereafter, in the wake of her first combat duty, Durova regularly seeks out the joys of occasional family inclusion, as surrogate grandson billeted with a kindly ‘‘staro´scina’’ (village elder’s wife) who houses Durova with her ‘‘boys’’ 39

Beth Holmgren and treats them all to warm milk in the mornings (71), and as the object of a motherly tavern keeper’s teasing affection. The previous year Durova reported her flight from the Cossack colonel’s wife who pronounced her ‘‘a girl in disguise.’’ Now she chooses to frequent the tavern where her hostess has nicknamed her ‘‘uhlan-panna’’ (‘‘hussar miss’’) and threatens to lace the shapely officer in her own enormous corset, to the general merriment of her family (59). Durova’s new tolerance suggests a greater security in her disguise as well as her restlessness with its emotional limitations. She often as not settles for a stylized intimacy, with stock family roles and conventional expressions of hospitality, attachment, and play. For example, Durova remains sanguine when other ‘‘regimental ladies’’—‘‘the finest beings in the world’’—take up the tavern keeper’s refrain of ‘‘hussar miss’’: ‘‘Since I hear jokes like this almost every day, I am so accustomed to them that they hardly ever embarrass me anymore’’ (83). These women of her regimental family have emerged as most desirable companions in her narrative, for they prove ‘‘always kind, always obliging, lively, bold, cheerful; they like to go horseback riding or for walks, to laugh, and to dance!’’ (83). Durova does not always encounter welcoming hosts, and at one point her military duties nearly force her into the role of bad son. Saddled with the unhappy commission of foraging for supplies, Durova anguishes over the presumptuous order which she melodramatically abhors as ‘‘a sleeping viper on my bosom beneath my uniform’’ (121). The Polish landowners she must petition all treat her as hospitably as their means and moods allow, but in each case she fears confrontation with a parental host and the consequent forfeit of her welcome. At odds here are Durova’s assumed identity and her personal longing for the acceptance and lavish hospitality that she has learned to expect from the Poles, who, as she matter-of-factly interjects, ‘‘are always very courteous’’ (120). Her quoted thoughts at ‘‘staro´scina’’ T’s estate speak to her sense of duplicity: ‘‘Now we were nothing but a throng of fully grown children, and yet in an hour or two suddenly all would change; I would become a desperate uhlan with the power and possibility of seizing forage from them’’ (121). Her dilemma actually moves her to damn her military persona ‘‘for the first time ever’’ (122). Appropriately enough for this fairy-tale sequence of three encounters, Polish hospitality triumphs in the final visit. The first landowner, despite his courtesy, can offer the already guilt-ridden Durova nothing but naked pain, for he has lost both his son and his goods. She fares better with ‘‘staro´scina’’ T, who dispatches the young uhlan to play with her grandchildren while she attends to the order, but Durova is ultimately disillusioned by the ‘‘foolish’’ old lady’s condescension. With the last landowner, curiously categorized as the ‘‘old Nationalist,’’ the fit between duty and desire is just right. Here Durova not only happens on yet another Pole who has come to love her ‘‘like a son’’ but also a retired cavalryman who grasps Durova’s dilemma and relishes in her an image of his youth. By behaving honestly and reasonably with a hospitable fellow 40

Imitation of Life officer, Durova once more reconciles her officer identity with that of the good son, prompting the old Nationalist himself to orchestrate a childish party: I stayed. To reward me for this concession, my host invited three or four families from neighboring estates to visit him. I had a very merry time at the gallant Nationalist’s house; we danced, played every game imaginable, and ran through the rooms no better than five-year-olds, and even Marusia’s frowns could not quiet the noise, talk, laughter, and dances; moreover, our host surpassed our expectations by keeping a huge table set with sweets, jams, and delicacies of every sort. (124)

In this extraordinary coda, Durova’s unhappy childhood is undone, and she is recompensed with a supportive and providential father figure, freedom of movement and freedom to play, and blithe disregard for the controlling female housekeeper, Marusia. The Nationalist’s party epitomizes the greatest psychological satisfaction of Durova’s permanently youthful military career— that of an eternally recurring boyhood.

An O≈cer and a Gentleman In her tales of surrogate paternal acceptance, Durova most often represents herself as a child or a youth, albeit with tolerably girlish looks. She shrewdly launches her escape in this guise: ‘‘My Childhood Years’’ dispenses with the complicating facts of her 1801 marriage to Ivan Chernov in Sarapul and the son she bore in 1803. Whatever the probable reasons for this bold self-censorship— her bid for unadulterated audience sympathy, her reluctance to narrate more shocking marital abuse—Durova’s consequent image is that of the virginal recruit.7 In the opening memoir her claims of a ‘‘natural’’ inclination for military service do not extend to sexual preference; in fact, she acknowledges an early aborted infatuation with a young man. In the Journals, however, she divulges no heterosexual romantic attachment to the many men in her life, reserving outbursts of passionate love for her various ‘‘fathers,’’ her first beloved steed Alcides, and the pup Cupid whose charm eases her back into civilian life. Durova’s prudish omissions characterize the published accounts of many women warriors, whose public ‘‘acceptance was often based on a denial of [their] sexuality.’’8 She thus preempts the double accusations of promiscuity and ‘‘unnatural’’ sexual relations customarily leveled at outlaw Amazons. Yet most astonishing in this chaste hussar miss’s account is her occasional emulation of the officer flirt. One might argue that Durova’s mock romantic adventures constitute ‘‘bold caricatures of male behaviour’’ or inklings of naïve lesbianism, but they mainly attest to her happy conformity.9 Soon after Durova settles into her regiment as proven soldier and accepted comrade, she acquires the habit of transcribing the regiment’s moods and behaviors as her own. Once again, her Polish contacts prove formative. Durova closely observes their romances, in part because these harbor excellent story-making material. 41

Beth Holmgren For example, her extensive musings about a legend of the Ossolinski clan, in which a prince divorced his noble wife to wed a peasant girl and thereby incurred his family’s murderous wrath, ultimately evolve into her short story, ‘‘Count Mauritius.’’10 This particular subject also develops Durova’s eye for the ladies, a by-product of both her general position as voyeur and, very likely, the influence of her officer peers. Her tale of the Ossolinskis ´ stems directly from her scrutiny of two portraits, an icon of the Virgin Mary cast with the features of the prince’s second wife and a picture of his surprisingly beautiful, appropriately melancholy first wife. Detailing the latter’s portrait, Durova sits in judgment over these specimens of female beauty as well as the taste of their lover: ‘‘What touching beauty! Sadness and reverence are portrayed in her black eyes. She has delicate dark brows, rosy lips, and a pale, but comely face, all the features of which express an intelligence and gentleness that are quite enchanting. I am astonished at Ossolinski!’’ (75). Durova still admits to being rattled by the returned gaze of nonregimental ladies, and she is dismayed when an army acquaintance schemes to introduce her to the immodest and beautiful Baroness Czechowicz so as to relish the contrast between virginal soldier and femme fatale. Durova scolds him but pointedly quotes his reasoning: But you are intolerable and comical in your virginal modesty. Do you know what I have to say to you? If I had a wife as modest and diffident as you, I would kiss her feet; but if I had a son with the same qualities, I would thrash him soundly. Now judge for yourself, shouldn’t we take every means possible to break you of your comical diffidence? It doesn’t become a hussar and is of no earthly use to him. (87)

This impromptu little lecture on hussar audacity voices a peer pressure that will tell on Durova’s behavior as she learns not to contrast. In the instance cited above the comically diffident hussar miss will not brave the baroness, yet elsewhere she schools herself for contact by admiring the coquettish games between tsarist officers and Polish ladies. In a section formally announced as ‘‘The Ball,’’ Durova, the storyteller-in-training, conveys the scene at General Suvorov’s quarters in Dubno with all the appropriate clichés of set and character: The spacious halls of Suvorov’s house were filled with a brilliant society. Countless lamps flooded all the rooms with bright light. Music thundered. Lovely Polish ladies, waltzing, hung amorously on the elbows of our adroit, slender hussars. Suvorov has been extremely spoiled by the Polish ladies. They forgive him altogether too much for his handsome looks; he says anything that comes into his head—and the things that sometimes come into his head are marvelous! (77)

Suvorov himself chooses to jolt Durova out of her bashfulness by recommending her, a virgin betrayed by ‘‘his’’ rosy complexion, to the lovely Princess Lubomirska.11 Shortly after this would-be sexual initiation by her command42

Imitation of Life ing officer, Durova beats a hasty retreat to her quarters; she is not ready for this lesson in hussar behavior. But a few years later her perspective has conformed to a startling degree. Summarizing the romance of her new commander, Tutolmin, with the Polish Countess Manuzzi as the regiment mobilizes, Durova narrates a kind of collective disposition, a regimental voice-over, in lieu of her individual response: ‘‘Yesterday, when we parted, we agreed to meet earlier, dance longer, and once again inflict the old countess on our Gruzintsev for the entire evening. But that’s how transient our earthly blessings are. Move out in twenty-four hours! Magic words! From them Manuzzi’s tears are flowing’’ (111). Durova no longer singles herself out as the reluctant party goer, the rosy-complexioned virgin, but simply derives her opinions, emotions, and actions from the ‘‘we’’ of her high-living regiment. Nor is her conformity relegated to moments of collective action. With no warning or self-reflection, Durova has begun to behave like a gallant hussar on her own reconnaissance. Reportedly ‘‘driven by hussar enterprise,’’ she invades a private home in D˛abrowica in quest of its talented piano player, and excuses her effrontery before the lady musician in question with a glib explanation of her ‘‘helpless’’ enchantment. In this case Durova cedes the ensuing romantic opportunity to her fellow officer W˛atróbka, although she cultivates an intense friendship with the lady, and the lady’s mother inevitably ‘‘loves [her] like a son’’ (102).12 Durova ventures further in erotic terms with a more comical prospect and with the same befuddling lack of introspection; contrast here is provided by the dour husband. Her hostess in this episode, the young wife of a Uniate priest, flaunts her infatuation with Durova by serving the Russian special delicacies right under her husband’s nose. Instead of fear at her possible exposure, Durova expresses indignation at her ethnic mislabeling: My hostess tries my patience! She never lets a day pass without telling me, ‘‘You must surely be Polish!’’ ‘‘What makes you think so?’’ I ask and get some extravagant nonsense in reply: ‘‘You speak so pleasantly; your manners are so noble!’’ She is out of her mind. ‘‘Is it really your opinion that pleasant conversation and noble manners are the exclusive property of Poles? Permit me to ask, how have all the other nations so sinned against you that you deny them these advantages?’’ Instead of replying, she laughs, changes the subject with jokes, and once again begins finding various Polish valors in me. (113)

Polish provenance clearly betokens sex appeal to the priest’s wife, a sure source of seductive behavior. Although Durova tries ‘‘all possible arguments to escape the honor of being a Pole,’’ she somewhat paradoxically musters other ethnic proofs of her appeal in her ‘‘particles of Ukrainian and Swedish blood.’’ Her hostess immediately reassigns her euphemistic compliment to the Swedes, whom she praises ‘‘to the skies’’ (114). 43

Beth Holmgren It is intriguing that Durova defensively intimates her erotic parity with a ‘‘pleasant, noble Pole’’ and does not quite abandon the flirtation. When orders to move out save her from a tricky denouement, she once again resorts to ‘‘love them and leave them’’ regimental platitudes: ‘‘Well, and it’s all for the best. If we must go, let’s be off. In quarters like these, we just go uselessly soft. We become accustomed to delicacies, affection, gratification’’ (115). Indeed, when her captain remarks on her ingratitude to ‘‘your priest’s wife and her black eyes,’’ Durova snaps to attention and does what an officer is expected to do, proffering her hostess a choice of keepsakes in a clichéd gesture of cavalier farewell: ‘‘I ran after her, put my arm around her, and earnestly begged her at least to take the rhinestone belt buckle. ‘After all, you do like me, my dear little hostess! Don’t you want to take something you can wear close to your heart?’ ’’ (116). Although this gift-giving episode represents the height of Durova’s hussar audacity, her companion, Tornesi, seals the tale of her ‘‘exploits’’ with a teasing Polish song: ‘‘Do not love me, because it’s in vain . . .’’ (‘‘Nie kochaj si˛e we mnie, bo to nadaremnie . . .’’). Durova’s most extensive schooling in courtship, courtesy of her infatuated friend K., ends happily in K.’s marriage to his beloved Polish lady. It also marks an atypical complication and deepening of her involvement. Now conditioned to savor love affairs for their comic or lurid entertainment, she anticipates her friend’s laughable protestations of love as they travel to the lady’s home. Yet she is ‘‘very pleasantly deceived’’ when K. simply falls asleep. In contrast to most of Durova’s recorded experience, including the story of her parents’ elopement, this romance is neither cast with stock characters (the beautiful lady, the dashing or dastardly hussar) nor played out in standard speeches. The suitor is straightforward and sensible, ‘‘a kind man and a reliable officer,’’ and his beloved, though a beauty, presents ‘‘the bold mien of a grenadier’’ (192). For the first time Durova entertains the serious notion of stepping into the lover’s shoes: ‘‘If I were K., I too would choose her for my life’s partner and love her just the way he does: I would come to see her without hurrying to arrive, sleep the entire way, and wake up at the front door’’ (192). Once Durova hears of the impending wedding, she volunteers the most intimate expression of attachment she can muster—that of eager guest to approved hostess: ‘‘I hope to have a good time at their house when she becomes our regimental lady’’ (193). After the wedding she is surprised once more by her subjects’ individualism and intimacy, as her tête-à-tête with the new Mrs. K. unexpectedly shifts from ‘‘comical incidents’’ to topics of ‘‘the heart, love, ineffable emotions, constancy, happiness, unhappiness, intellect’’ (193). In depicting her two closest female interlocutors, the plainspoken Mrs. K. and the lady musician, Durova allows each to speak for herself and interjects no ‘‘regimental’’ commentary, perhaps indicating that their revelations confound the predictable officer-lady exchange. Yet, just as significant, she ventures no identification with them and their tolerable domestic lot. Durova cleaves to the public part of male confidante; her role playing indicates that 44

Imitation of Life even mimicry of a celibate male trumps the sanguine domesticity of her married regimental heroines.13

Identity and Conformity Durova’s term of service broke off rather abruptly in 1816, ostensibly motivated by her father’s plea for her retirement and his implicit offering—at last!—of a father-son relationship. Although her journal has traced the prosaic details and routines of army life, her farewell once again glosses over the experience in a series of clichés, demonstrating her abiding weakness for the army’s positive stereotypes, its glorified conformity: ‘‘the gleaming sword and the good steed . . . my friends . . . the merry life . . . drill, parades, mounted formations . . . the full gallop and the clash of swords’’ (224). Durova’s adventure and account are sanctioned by this insistent refrain. Her ‘‘extraordinary plan’’ plotted her escape from the drudgery, humiliation, and restraint that her mother identified as women’s lot and her pursuit of the dashing military career for which she was born. She knew the army as a fond parent (in the figures of father and hussar nanny) and a set of tomboyish games. Thus simplified, the army promised her a solution to the contradiction between her body and her lot, functioning as an authoritative collective whose acceptance would background her girlishness and transform her into a soldier-son. As her Journals do reflect, Durova’s martial proclivities fade as proof of her vocation as soon as she enters the male camp. Beyond cutting off her hair, roughening her voice, and handling her horse, she hasn’t the vaguest idea of what it means to be a man and an army officer. Her necessary masquerade forces her to improvise a ‘‘passing’’ identity on the fly, reading cues from her comrades and acquaintances. Observing and interacting with gracious Polish landowners, dashing Polish hussars, amorous Polish ladies, and approachable Polish ‘‘regimental women,’’ Durova masters the conventions of behaving as the boyish guest and the gallant officer. Her schooling as surrogate son proceeds very quickly, because this role, already familiar, makes allowances for her youth and inexperience. The many courteous, hospitable Poles she encounters extravagantly praise and coddle her as a soldier boy, and she in turn basks in their interest and avails herself of their treats and games, even if the latter are sometimes played at her expense. In these surrogate son situations her military gamble delivers just the reward that she left home to win. Her dalliance with erotic behavior is understandably more restricted, yet, like her role as son, eventually is represented as second nature. Durova’s bashfulness, a red flag of carefully closeted gender, impedes her merging with the army collective, but her keen scrutiny of army officers with their ladies— Suvorov with his lovely Polish friends, W˛atrobka with the lady pianist, Tutolmin with Countess Manuzzi—trains her in the officers’ skills of seduction and manipulation, nonstop appraisal of female beauty, and regimental allegiance. Durova stops marking her bashfulness and fear, either dissolving her45

Beth Holmgren self into the regiment’s first-person plural perspective or unself-consciously enacting hussar audacity on her own. Once again, Durova attempts to suggest a convincing conformity, although she is at times struck dumb by complicated exceptions to the romantic rules. Durova’s chameleon-like adaptation is fascinating but also disturbing in what it censors and endorses. In the presumably safe space of her journal, where she might have reflected on the psychological costs of her masquerade, Durova mainly complains of physical hardships and reliably seconds the views and actions of her comrades. She does not speculate about her own adult life outside of military service. Nor does she raise the damning specter of romantic relationships beyond her innocuous flirtations as an officer. Although Durova occasionally criticizes an exploitative order or an errant soldier, the army stands as the sanctioning authority in her text, the legislator of desirable identity and interaction, a neutralizer of any stigmatizing difference (be it sexual or ethnic). Like other women warriors ‘‘developing a strong male-identification,’’ she ‘‘appear[s] largely unconcerned about changing the society that produced the inequity which [she] felt most keenly in [her] own li[fe].’’14 Durova commemorates, but never emulates, the positive female role models that she observes, for these women must stand distinct as complementary and complimentary members of her regimental family. It must be noted, then, that the same selective obliviousness applies to Durova’s perception of the Poles. Out of ignorance or complicity, she remains silent about the brutal Russian occupation of Polish lands and the ‘‘other’’ Polish army allied with Napoleon against the tsar in a desperate struggle for Polish sovereignty. Although she primarily models her roles as soldier-son and gallant hussar in the tsarist army on Polish and Russian-Polish examples, she resists recognizing this debt in national, as opposed to individual, terms and begrudges the Poles their distinctions. The conformity that guarantees Durova’s worldly status renders her a sometime sexist and an unabashed nationalist who does not and perhaps cannot perceive the heterogeneity of her concept of national character, just as she conveniently overwrites her biological difference. A double irony undergirds her patriotic performance: Not only is this decorated cavalryman a woman, but she is also a Russian who successfully impersonates a Russian officer by borrowing from Polish types. In this sense Durova does succeed in remaking herself into a conventional officer of the imperial Russian army, with all his attendant privileges, prejudices, condescension, and implicitly mixed ethnic pedigree. Her own profound difference does not incline her to acknowledge other differences but commands her obedience in all other matters to a flawed status quo. To the Poles’ credit, Durova never senses her political onus as obligatory guest, her necessarily tolerated presence as an officer of the empire. Her permanent youth perhaps proofed her against nationalist hostility. To the credit of both Polish subjects and Russian diarist, however, longstanding political antagonisms do not sour private generosity and friendship in her account.15 Durova 46

Imitation of Life expresses her sincere gratitude to and affection for individual Poles, cherishing many of them as positive surrogate family—as proud and providing parents, confiding sisters, and mentoring big brothers. Her Journals thus tell a childishly emotional, naïvely regimented tale of Russian-Polish relations, recording anecdotes about the apolitical kindness of Polish strangers as Durova, the eternal guest, settles for the imitation of a happy boyhood and a dashing youth, and her Polish hosts indulge her fiction with the most punctilious and predictable hospitality. NOTES 1. Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars, translated, and with an introduction and notes, by Mary Fleming Zirin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 190. All Durova references and quotes in the essay are from this source, and hereafter only relevant page numbers will be included in the text. 2. Catherine Craft-Fairchild thus summarizes the representative trends of eighteenth-century British and American texts on women warriors: ‘‘Those narratives that commemorated real-life transvestism typically portrayed labouring-class women who cross-dressed in order to secure some of the economic and social advantages accorded to men’’ (‘‘Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity,’’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 2 [January 1998]: 171). 3. Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989), 13. 4. John L. Keep notes the shift in the Poles’ status after the 1831 revolt in Russianoccupied Poland: ‘‘Some 35,000 men were transferred to the Imperial forces from the Polish army when this was disbanded after the 1830–1 revolt’’ (Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1985], 327). 5. For good survey coverage of this allegiance, see Zarys dziejów wojskowo´sci polskiej do roku 1864: 1648–1864, ed. Jadwiga Nadzieja (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1966), 268–357. 6. Barbara Heldt, Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 82. 7. Although concluding that Durova’s experiences ‘‘generally ring true,’’ George Gutsche remarks that, ‘‘since so much of the narrative matches historical reality, her departures from historical truth are all the more problematic’’ (‘‘Nadezhda Durova,’’ in Russian Women Writers, vol. 1, ed. Christine Tomei [New York: Garland, 1999], 62). 8. Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989), 12. 9. Ibid., 55. 10. Zirin notes this journal-to-fiction progress in her footnote on page 75 of the English translation. Durova shows a similar propensity for story making in the Journals themselves, when she works up more ‘‘exotic’’ material into her ‘‘Tatar’s Tale’’ (156–62). 11. Keep exposes a very different relationship between the Poles and Suvorov, who led Russian troops in executing the second partition of Poland: ‘‘Suvorov, after capturing the city [Warsaw—BH], broke with eighteenth-century convention by allowing his

47

Beth Holmgren forces to loot it for several hours’’ (Soldiers of the Tsar, 216). Suvorov permitted the same sort of atrocities during the Turkish campaign (217). 12. Durova’s Journals reflect her absorption of other conventional hussar attitudes and reflexes, including her automatic denigration of noisy, mercenary, and ‘‘monstrous’’ Jews (68, 100) and her keen sense of outraged hussar honor. Indeed, her fury at the Polish colonel who very probably absconded with her fugitive hussars prompts her to consider ‘‘exchang[ing] shots’’ with him (85). A later deadly insult dealt her by Colonel Stackelberg provokes her to seek out General Kutuzov himself and to request a position as his orderly (149–50). 13. In this sense Durova’s text contrasts strongly with eighteenth-century American and British novelistic depictions of women’s cross-dressing, which, according to CraftFairchild, ‘‘signal the early novel’s commitment to portraying, and thereby constructing, a domestic ideal’’ (‘‘Cross-Dressing and the Novel,’’ 172). 14. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids, 12. 15. It is intriguing and heartening that several Polish writers (e.g., Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, Tadeusz Konwicki) demonstrate similar suspensions of judgment in sympathetically portraying individual Russian officers and soldiers in their work. I am grateful to Bozena Shallcross for this happy observation.

48

two

Imitation of Life A Russian Guest in the Polish Regimental Family Beth Holmgren

Nadezhda Durova (1783–1866), the famous Amazon who successfully masqueraded as a Russian officer during the Napoleonic wars, confesses late in her Journals that ‘‘for some reason I like being a guest better than a stay-athome.’’1 This specific statement was provoked by her keen displeasure at quitting the ‘‘beautiful land’’ of Holstein, where she and her fellow uhlans had been savoring their victory over Napoleon in the region’s lovely gardens and ‘‘light, airy parlors.’’ Back on Russian soil in ‘‘the muddiest little town in the world,’’ Durova cannot help but complain. Yet her petulant admission also reveals a key impulse for her entire journey and the narrative that re-presents it. Unlike many other self-made women warriors, Durova enlisted for neither love (of the heterosexual romantic sort) nor money.2 Her story is powered by the extraordinary fact that she, a young woman from a gentry family, pursued life in the regiment as salvation from a domestic prison and thereafter toured much of Europe as a military officer, an institutional ‘‘guest.’’ Durova embraced male impersonation not as a means to the conventional ends of her time (requited love, financial security, sacrifice for the nation), but as an end in and of itself. 37

three

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising Megan Dixon

Discussions of Alexander Pushkin’s life and work at the turn of 1830 and 1831 usually involve his marriage and his fruitful autumn at Boldino. Reading through his poetry for this period offers a sudden surprise: the poems of the Polish uprising, written in June, August, and September of 1831. If we recall that Pushkin was in Boldino from October 1830 (shortly before the outbreak of the uprising), that Baron Anton Antonovich Del’vig, Pushkin’s closest friend up to that time, died in January 1831, that Pushkin was married in February 1831, and that the uprising ended in Poland’s defeat on August 26, 1831, it is clear how closely entwined with other work and thoughts his composition of these three poems must be. Further, their very public appearance demands understanding: at a time when many scholars maintain that Pushkin was focusing on his private life, why did Pushkin decide/consent to write these poems and then have them circulated in an ostentatiously presented brochure? The Polish uprising, which began in Warsaw in November 1830, gave Pushkin the ideal opportunity to fashion himself as a national poet and to present Russia as a united, coherent nation vis-à-vis Europe. Pushkin’s three poems, often called the ‘‘anti-Polish trilogy,’’1 assert Russia’s superiority in the 49

Megan Dixon historical struggle of the Slavs. Through these poems Pushkin also sought to establish himself as the premier public poetic voice of the time and to establish a public opinion for Russia. Ideas of the poet as voice for the people, of the Russian nation, and of public opinion as taking shape in print all coincide in these poems and their story. Poland remained a space in which these ideas could be deployed. In these poems Pushkin confronts the European poets and orators who criticized Russia’s swift and brutal opposition to the uprising (seen by many in French-centered Europe as a case of self-determination thwarted by Russian imperial designs). More important, however, in the poems Pushkin encounters Poland as a stubborn force resistant to Russia’s historical role as the leader of the Slavic nations. In light of other work done recently on Pushkin’s encounter with other poets and challengers (such as Felix Derzhavin, Adam Mickiewicz, or gambling partners), the poems of the Polish uprising must be read as a competitive negotiation between Pushkin and his interlocutors. Pushkin’s specific relationship to these interlocutors must partly trump the universal principles that we think ought to apply (in other words, that Pushkin as a person valuing independence should want that as a political opportunity for Poland), although the choice to write these poems also has significance in the context of other choices and the responses of his peers. The open confrontation with Europe seems to overshadow the simultaneous encounter with Poland’s presence in Russia’s history, but that encounter has a vital function nevertheless. The popular view of Pushkin’s identity associates him with Dostoevsky’s famous words in 1881—‘‘universal responsiveness’’ (‘‘vsemirnaia otzychyvost’ ’’). He is a poet who can capture the spirit of any nation in his verse— England, Spain, the Caucasus—or so claim many Pushkin scholars. His encounters with Poland reveal other sides of his poetry and other attitudes which invite us to reimagine the picture that has lasted so long beyond Dostoevsky’s pronouncement. Pushkin does not conquer the Poland that he encounters, as Russia defeated the Polish uprisings in the nineteenth century; Poland remains to question and complicate.2 In June 1831, Pushkin wrote ‘‘Before the Sacred Tomb’’ (‘‘Pered grobnitseiu sviatoi’’); on August 16, ‘‘To the Calumniators of Russia’’ (‘‘Klevetnikam Rossii’’), and on September 5, ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’ (‘‘Borodinskaia godovshchina’’). Presentation of the second and third poems before Russian tsar Nicholas I was made on September 5; on September 7, Pushkin, together with Vasilii Zhukovskii, received the censor’s permission to publish these two, and by September 14, one poem by Zhukovskii and the two by Pushkin were available in print.3 Although the poems have often been explained away as an aberrant episode, Pushkin expressed his pride in them as late as 1836 in a letter to Prince Nikolai Borisovich Golitsyn.4 David Bethea in particular asserts that Pushkin never made a written record, or allowed anything to be published, that he had not considered with 50

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising extreme care and for which he had not chosen a place in his oeuvre. Given this, it seems highly unlikely that Pushkin would allow himself to be forced to write these poems praising the Russian imperial defeat of Polish hopes for an independent state; in spite of his situation at the Russian court, Pushkin does not seem to have allowed himself to be forced into anything, certainly nothing that involved his writing. The poems must have had a distinct purpose, bound up with the transitions that Pushkin was making during this year and with his ideas of the poet’s self. The poems of the Polish uprising provide an example of the kind of nation building in print that Benedict Anderson has discussed. A year before Sergei Uvarov’s proposal of ‘‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationalism’’ as a motto for official Russian nationalism,5 Pushkin wrote the poems as his own gesture toward crafting a common historical Russian identity in text. For Soviet scholars, they were politically unacceptable in light of their notorious ‘‘anti-Polish’’ stance; Polish readers (justly) perceive them as ‘‘anti-Polish.’’ Waclaw Lednicki captures the paradox in his 1928 book-length study of the poems, still the most thorough to date in Pushkin studies: he judges Pushkin against a standard of a universal, unplaced, ‘‘fair-minded’’ world citizen but is forced by these poems to conclude that Pushkin was essentially just another Russian after all. Lednicki claims that ‘‘the odes [the three poems] were the most forceful expression of . . . national delirium . . . without anything in common with true poetry.’’6 The opposition between ‘‘true poetry’’ and ‘‘national prejudice’’ sets up a dichotomy that erases Pushkin’s positionality. Recognizing that Pushkin was at the time firmly placed in Russia and in Russian literary culture, we have to look at the poems from his point of view: not as ‘‘national prejudice’’ but as an attempt to build Russian identity from the inside. We also have to keep in mind what Poland represented for him. From the outside, we can see with twenty-first-century analytical tools that Pushkin’s poems participate in a discourse of empire that later brought Russification to the territories of the Poles and other national groups.7 However, the poems should not be muddled together with active implementation of Russification, since this policy did not arise until much later. It is also important to remember that Pushkin had never been in Poland, indeed had barely left the territory of Russia proper during his life (stays in the Caucasus being notable exceptions). He thus had to write about Poland in relation to Russia from an acutely ‘‘imaginative’’ standpoint. Recalling this fact, and establishing that the chief audience of the poems was the Russian public itself, will illuminate how and why Pushkin chooses to appropriate Poland as well as the vehemence of his pro-Russian stance. Scholars apologetic for the poems maintain that they are aesthetically inferior to much of Pushkin’s other work and therefore not really worth discussing.8 Pushkin would disagree: ‘‘(Just as any other phenomenon in the history of humanity) [they] should attract the attention of conscientious students of the truth.’’9 Pushkin took the opportunity offered by the Polish upris51

Megan Dixon ing to fashion himself publicly as an artist, yet in them remained loyal to his private aesthetic needs. The poems relate coherently to the rest of Pushkin’s oeuvre, and the writing of them can be correlated to other attempts Pushkin made to take on an influential role in Russian society. The complexity of his positionality during this particular attempt threatened it with failure from the outset, but analyzing it is important. Pushkin’s ‘‘need to answer’’ the historical demand for a poetic marker of Russia’s victory (just as Lomonosov and Derzhavin before him) produced the poems of the Polish uprising.10 Ironically the poem that follows these three in a list of poems written in 1831 is ‘‘Echo,’’ a poem in which the poet laments the public’s lack of response to his ‘‘answer’’ to events; in this text the poet is, by definition, responsive (‘‘at each sound you give birth to a sudden answer’’ [‘‘na vsiakii zvuk / Svoi otklik . . . / Rodish’ ty vdrug’’]). The Polish uprising offered an opportunity to ‘‘answer’’ a specific call in Russian society, as discussed below. Pushkin attempts in the poems to navigate between two strong desires: his determination to be heard as a poet, which found an outlet in the public nature of the poems, and his desire to remain independent as a poet, which is reflected in so many other poems of the same period. He chose an unstable point for the intersection of these two desires.11 In order to expand on previous analysis of the poems, I take David Bethea’s description of ‘‘three psychological ‘vectors’ of Pushkin’s personality’’ as a point of departure: ‘‘his independence and stremlenie pervenstovavat’ [urge to be first], his superstition and sense of play/risk with cosmic forces, and his passion for formal symmetry and composition.’’12 The poems of the Polish uprising are Pushkin’s attempt to become the ‘‘first poet of the realm’’ and to outdo his own past poetry and past public image; to take the risk of ‘‘playing’’ (writing poetry) close to the historical forces of Russia’s destiny and the power wielded over him by the tsar; and to write the Polish uprising into a history of Russia that would match up dates, generals, and locations in a meaningful pattern. In writing the poems of the Polish uprising, he seems to align himself with didactic nationalist patriotism. He invited accusations of obsequiousness to the tsar; some contemporaries even believed that Pushkin wrote the uprising poems at the tsar’s request.13 The temptation to leap into the risky performance of public national poet lures him into a daring, headstrong departure from both the Romantic parameters of the Lovers of Wisdom and the civic expectations of the exDecembrists and his liberal friends. In other words, Pushkin risks his poetic freedom in a test of his ability to voice voluntary patriotism. Olga Murav’eva confirms this in saying, ‘‘While the democratically inclined part of Russian society tended to the identification of independence with oppositionalism, Pushkin understood independence as the possibility to freely express his opinion without worrying whether or not it coincided with the official position.’’14 Russian scholar A. V. Kushakov adds that ‘‘[Pushkin had] acute feelings of indignation against that part of aristocratic society which in 1812 and 1830–1831 did not take to heart either the woes or the glory of the 52

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising fatherland, which remained either indifferent or even maliciously satisfied by the complications in Russia’s relations with France and Europe.’’15 Pushkin’s contemporaries expected a politically engaged poet to take part in the opposition, while Pushkin stubbornly chose to take a path all his own, confident that he could set an example of Russian identity that others would follow. The terms ‘‘performance’’ and ‘‘pedagogy’’ used by Homi Bhabha help to separate the two elements at work here:16 Pushkin functioned in an atmosphere of pedagogy, of growing official nationalism which would take public shape a year later with Uvarov’s proclamation. However, he remains an individual poet selecting elements of Russia’s history to weave into his own performance, or spontaneous enactment of Russian identity in a text. Although he is trying to exemplify a patriotic attitude and a respect for history, he sees himself not as a conservative force but rather as a crafting force, running impetuously ahead of the national march to model the kind of confidence in and loyalty to Russia which he perceived as lacking.17 Pushkin saw the victory over Poland as important not exclusively as a victory in and of itself but rather as an opportunity for Russians to envision themselves as a unified whole at a positive moment in their history.18 Murav’eva confirms that ‘‘the poems, formally addressed to the French deputies [in the French government], were actually intended above all for a Russian audience.’’19 Specifying the poems’ audience is crucial. Pushkin expressed wishes that the French poets who criticized Russia could have seen his poems, but there could have been little hope of this in 1831. The poems’ unusually swift approval by government censors and appearance in print (just nine days from the composition of ‘‘Borodinskaia Godovshchina’’ to printing in a brochure!) indicates that the Russian reading public itself was the target. Pushkin had already perceived what Anderson describes the other nations of Europe discovering throughout the nineteenth century: a coherent sense of national self needed to be spread in print.20 In 1830, Pushkin asserted, ‘‘I am busying myself about the good of our letters, not just about my own pleasure’’ (‘‘Ia khlopochu o pol’ze slovesnosti, ne tol’ko o svoem udovol’stvii’’).21 Someone needed to bring cohesion to national letters (russkaia slovesnost’).

The Context for Pushkin’s Poems of the Polish Uprising The apparently antiliberal tendency of the poems ceases to be a sensational issue if we remove the Soviet imperative to make Pushkin into something he never was—that is, a populist radical. We can reconsider the aesthetic objection to the tone of the poems by noting their connection to the legacy of Derzhavin and eighteenth-century literature, as well as by fixing their place in relation to some of Pushkin’s earlier poems. Bethea has argued convincingly that by the end of the 1820s Pushkin had abandoned the forum of poetry addressed to the public, along with its highflown rhetoric and odic vostorg (ecstasy). However, many of Pushkin’s peers 53

Megan Dixon among the Decembrists and Lovers of Wisdom still saw a role for poetry as political catalyst at the national level. Their requirement that the poet take an oppositional political stance caused criticism of Pushkin’s tsar-praising ‘‘Stanzas’’ (‘‘Stansy,’’ 1826) and provoked Pushkin’s response in ‘‘To My Friends’’ (‘‘Druz’iam,’’ 1828). Faced with the exacting political demands of some of his contemporaries, Pushkin preferred a more private poetry to the public soapbox. Against contemporary images of the poet as herald of a new political era, his poem ‘‘The Prophet’’ (‘‘Prorok,’’ 1826) can be read as a rejection of romantic revolutionary impulses that irresponsibly transfer the rhetoric of poetry into life.22 When ‘‘The Prophet’’ is juxtaposed to poems by Mikhail Glinka and Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker, the non-didactic quality of Pushkin’s text comes into sharp relief. Both Glinka’s ‘‘Go to the People, My Prophet!’’ (‘‘Idi k narodu, moi prorok!’’ 1822) and Kiukhel’beker’s ‘‘Prophecy’’ (‘‘Prorochestvo,’’ 1822) contain specific, contemporary political messages to their respective prophets; Kiukhel’beker’s prophet, for example, was called to criticize the Russian war against Turkey. By contrast, Pushkin’s poem simply portrays a man from an ancient tribe confronting a supernatural force.23 The poem may be read at many levels, but in competition with Glinka’s and Kiukhel’beker’s it appears as a demonstration that the poet-like figure may not have a political mission to fulfill. Kiukhel’beker uses the words narod and svoboda, words with much more specific connotations than Pushkin’s glagol and liudi. These lines are from ‘‘Prophecy’’: Ha to zd teve r øzamehd æaz N cnzy bo≥æbngatd hapoæq?— Bocctahd, øebeu, øpopok Cbovoæq! Bcøprhd, bo≥bectn, œto r be∑az!

Was fire given you for this, And the strength to move nations?— Arise, singer, prophet of Freedom! Spring up, herald what I foretold!

The famous last line of Pushkin’s poem ‘‘The Prophet’’ reads simply: ‘‘Sear the hearts of people with the word’’ (‘‘Glagolom zhgi serdtsa liudei’’). What, then, turned him again to the public use of words in the service of the national purpose? Pushkin had rejected the stance adopted by Kiukhel’beker and other Decembrist peers, even ignoring the call of Dmitrii Venevitinov to become the national poet. This stance had come to seem self-indulgent and unrealistic to him, probably because of his view that Russia needed more support than criticism. So, instead of an oppositional stance, in 1831 he once again takes a position that could be read by friends as pro-government. Perhaps a growing political pragmatism made him reject the fashionable revolutionary impulse for a more complex role. He chooses his moment to ‘‘go public’’ in order to take advantage of a specific opportunity to participate in crafting Russia. The poems are perhaps partially an effort to rework Pushkin’s attitude to Derzhavin. As Bethea points out, Pushkin had been attracted by the roles Derzhavin had managed to combine: ‘‘Man of History, poet-statesman and 54

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising poet-warrior, advisor to tsars . . . and beneficiary of patronage,’’ although Bethea also maintains that these roles were closed to Pushkin.24 We could hypothesize that Pushkin, seeing the importance of this event for Russian history, decided that someone needed to rise to the challenge of producing a Russian ode for the occasion—something that his predecessors Lomonosov and Derzhavin did for the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine. Could a major Russian military conflict pass without an ode? The Derzhavinian language of the poems of the Polish uprising and their open praise for military leaders (Suvorov, Paskevich)—both of which Pushkin criticized in other contexts— make this hypothesis plausible. However, the lack of clear success as a result means that the problem is more complicated than this hypothesis allows. Pushkin’s interest in the poet’s public role goes back to his earliest successful poetry. The language of the Polish uprising poems recalls an earlier poem that explores the power of the poet’s words: ‘‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’’ (‘‘Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele,’’ 1814). In stanza 12 of ‘‘Recollections,’’ the ‘‘ecstasy’’ (‘‘vostorg’’) of the soldiers is mentioned; in stanza 20, the poet’s ‘‘harmonious voice’’ (‘‘stroinyi glas’’) is called upon to ‘‘drop fire into their hearts’’ (‘‘posypat’ ogn’ v serdtsa’’).25 As stated, Bethea shows how Pushkin later kept his distance from the youthful rhetoric of ‘‘Recollections,’’ but the existence of the Polish uprising poems and their likeness to thematic predecessors show just how persistent the question of the poet’s social efficacy remained for Pushkin, long past his growing doubts about it in the wake of the Decembrist uprising. Although arguments that Pushkin abandoned vostorg by this time are convincing, we must see that the word appears twice in the first poem and prominently in the third. Is there something in Poland that calls forth this Russian vostorg? In the context of Russian letters, Pushkin may have abandoned it; but in the context of Russia’s international position and the need to confront ‘‘romantic’’ Poland, vostorg steps back into service. It is helpful to recall how Pushkin had described Poland earlier in his oeuvre. A combative attitude toward Poland can be seen in an early reference to the historical Russo-Polish conflict, the poem ‘‘To Count Olizar’’ (‘‘Grafu Olizaru,’’ 1824). The lines usually emphasized in this poem describe the peace-making activity of poetry and poets: ‘‘the voice of wondrous poetry / Reconciles the hostile hearts’’ (‘‘glas poezii chudesnoi / Serdtsa vrazhdebnye druzhit’’).26 The vigorous antipathy expressed by prior lines in ‘‘To Count Olizar’’ usually attracts less attention: ‘‘And he’s not ours, who with one of your girls / Is linked by an enchanted ring; / We won’t drink with the sacred cup / The health of your beautiful women’’ (‘‘I tot ne nash, kto s devoi vashei / Kol’tsom zavetnym sopriazhen; / Ne vyp’em my zavetnoi chashei / Zdorov’e krasnykh vashikh zhen’’). This type of aggression and rivalry (probably also deriving from jealousy over Olizar’s pretensions for the hand of Maria Raevskaia) remains in the Polish uprising poems—as Lednicki noticed. The coexistence within this poem of the high mission of poetic art and the antipathy expressed 55

Megan Dixon toward Poles demonstrates the complexity of Pushkin’s assertions of concern for Russian literary development; in this textual situation, it is in the very conflict with Poland that he finds a new energy for his own poetry.

A New Reading of the Poems Even with the much-discussed turn to prose at the beginning of the 1830s, it is still striking that out of six completed and sometime-published poems written in 1831, three of these concern the Polish uprising. What part of the turn in Pushkin’s biography did this encounter with Poland help to solidify? Certainly a Russian victory over the uprising allowed Pushkin to fulfill the part of himself that craved historical symmetry. As Harsha Ram has noted, it is possible ‘‘[to examine] . . . Russian imperial culture as an aesthetic phenomenon’’; it was believed, Ram maintains, that the ‘‘imperial sublime . . . [would] establish Russian poetry as a national patrimony only by projecting it onto the scene of Russia’s imperial exploits.’’27 The three poems of the Polish uprising definitely project poetry onto the history of Russia’s imperial exploits: all three refer to the Russian victory over Napoleon, as well as to other recent military successes. In the poems Pushkin’s contemporary Ivan Fedorovich Paskevich, commander of the Russian army against the 1830 Polish uprising, is joined by other famous generals: Suvorov, who defeated Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko and Polish resistance to Russian takeover in 1794, and Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon in the War of 1812.28 As noted above, Pushkin presented ‘‘To the Calumniators of Russia’’ and ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’ to the tsar and his family on September 5 (the very day he dated the second poem). Pushkin thus took active part in a performance of national identity which also included announcing the capture of Warsaw on August 26, the anniversary of the failed battle for Borodino in 1812 (marking a satisfying historical redemption), and the delivery of the news of Russian victory by Suvorov’s grandson.29 The lexicon of the poems resonates with Pushkin’s wider concerns. Russian and Soviet studies call the poems odes; Yuri Stennik writes that ‘‘the motif of ‘ecstasy’ [vostorg] becomes the deciding indicator [opredeliaiushchii priznak] of the relationship of these poems [of the Polish uprising] to the ode.’’30 Although the poems do not fit all scholars’ requirements for odes, the web of references is significant.31 Pushkin’s return to this somewhat anachronistic genre indicates his opinion that certain features were appropriate for the occasion, such as ‘‘the experiencing [perezhivanie] of an event,’’ the expression of ‘‘political emotion.’’ Elena Pogosian notes that ‘‘the Russian ode . . . was supposed to express the feelings of the people [narod] and be the ‘voice of the people’ . . . [O]fficial life [byt ] demands not only strictly ritualized behavior, but also ritualized experiencing, and the ode fixes this ritualized experiencing and simultaneously ‘teaches’ it.’’32 In individual analyses of the poems we can trace the appeal of these odic features to Pushkin. In contrast to earlier odes, the speaker in the two published poems of the Polish uprising poems does not 56

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising reveal himself or his state of mind; significantly he does not praise the tsar (a common practice found in earlier victory odes). He concerns himself only with exemplifying the collective experience, encouraging praise not of the sovereign but of the Russian people. This focus on narod rather than the tsar ultimately means that the poems craft praise for the Russians in a complex interaction with the Poles. The imagery in the first poem, ‘‘Before the Sacred Tomb,’’ connects the entire cycle strongly to the concept of the poet’s voice; it sets up the following two poems as an enactment of its predictions. Written in June 1831, ‘‘Before the Sacred Tomb’’ is set at the tomb of Kutuzov in Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The poem is a meditation on the voice of Russia that Pushkin would like to embody—that is, the voice that he strives to project in the succeeding two poems.33 Øepeæ gpovhnue« cbrto∞ Cto« c øohnkwe« gzabo∞ . . . Bcë cønt kpygom oæhnzamøaæq Bo mpake xpama ≥ozotrt Ctozøob gpahnthqe gpomaæq N nx ≥hameh habncwn∞ præ.

Before the sacred tomb I stand with bowed head . . . All sleeps around; only the lamps In the temple’s darkness make golden The granite masses of the columns And the hanging row of their banners.

Øoæ hnmn cønt ce∞ bzacteznh, Ce∞ næoz cebephqx æpyånh, Mactntq∞ ctpaå ctpahq æepåabho∞, Cmnpntezd bcex eë bpagob, Ce∞ octazdho∞ n≥ ctan czabho∞ Ekatepnhnhcknx opzob.

Beneath them sleeps that powerful man, That idol of the northern bands, The venerable guardian of a powerful land, Subduer of all her enemies, That last in the glorious flock Of Catherine’s eagles.

B tboem gpovy boctopg ånbet! Oh pycckn∞ gzac ham n≥æaet; Oh ham tbepænt o to∞ goænhe, Kogæa hapoæho∞ bepq gzac Bo≥≥baz k cbrto∞ tboe∞ ceænhe: «Næn, cøaca∞!» Tq bctaz—n cøac.

In your tomb ecstasy lives! It sends forth to us a Russian voice; It tells us of that time When the voice of national faith Called out to your saintly grayed head: ‘‘Go forth, save us!’’ You arose—to save.

Bhemzn å n æhecd haw bephq∞ gzac, Bctahd n cøaca∞ uapr n hac, O, ctapeu gpo≥hq∞, ha mghobehde Rbncd y æbepn gpovobo∞, Rbncd: bæoxhn boctopg n pbehde Øozkam, octabzehhq∞ tovo∞.

Hearken today to our faithful voice, Arise, and save the tsar and us, O, fearsome elder, for a moment Appear at the entrance to your tomb, Appear: inspire ecstasy and valor In the troops you left behind.

Rbncd n æzahn« cboe∞ Ham ykaån b tozøe boåæe∞, Kto tbo∞ haczeæhnk, tbo∞ n≥vpahhq∞. Ho xpam—b mozœahde øogpyåeh, N tnx tboe∞ mognzq vpahho∞ Hebo≥mytnmq∞, beœhq∞ coh.

Appear and with your hand Show us in the crowd of heroes Who is your chosen, who your heir. But the temple is plunged in silence, And quiet is the eternal sleep Of your warrior’s grave.

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Megan Dixon The tone of ‘‘Before the Sacred Tomb’’ is elevated by the use of several Old Slavonic forms, for example, glava for golova in the first stanza; glas in stanzas 3 and 4; vnemli in stanza 4 (recalling the use of ‘‘vizhd’ i vnemli’’ in ‘‘The Prophet’’ of 1826).34 Such language recalls the odes of Lomonosov and Derzhavin, and indicates the poem’s connection to a historical tradition. In the first stanza, the poet-speaker places himself before the tomb almost as before an altar (compare the altar of Apollo), with bowed head. It is partly Pushkin’s self-placement that made this poem unsuitable to include in the September brochure with the other two; with the presence of ‘‘I,’’ the poet questions his own role in the resolution of the nation’s uncertainty. But he is already moving toward articulating the general voice of the nation. The speaker exclaims to Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, ‘‘In your tomb ecstasy lives!’’ In line 23, he requests, ‘‘Appear, inspire ecstasy . . .’’ (‘‘Iavis’: vdokhni vostorg . . .’’). This ecstasy is not the individual transports of the speaker—who only seeks guidance—but the uniting ecstasy of purpose. This becomes clear in the image of Kutuzov as spiritual patron of the current military cause: Kutuzov is supposed to inspire ecstasy in the troops (polki). The use of the first person plural pronoun ‘‘we’’ (‘‘sends forth to us’’) also enacts the sense of unity that the speaker seeks. When Pushkin finally published this poem in 1836, he excluded the final two stanzas, perhaps because they reflect a sense of fear and uncertainty at Russia’s success against the uprising. Initially the poet-speaker wants to hear the voice of Kutuzov’s blessing on Russia’s current endeavor. In the three places where the word ‘‘voice’’ or ‘‘glas’’ appears, it is first ‘‘the Russian voice,’’ which comes out of Kutuzov’s tomb along with vostorg; the ‘‘voice of national faith’’ is what had called out to Kutuzov’s ‘‘sacred age’’ in 1812, and, finally, ‘‘our faithful voice’’ is what calls for help in this time of the uprising. However, although this russkii glas will potentially come from the tomb in response to our faithful voice—just as once Kutuzov himself responded to the voice of national faith—when the poet asks for a sign to show who can lead Russia out of its current trouble, he gets none: ‘‘But the temple is plunged in silence, / And quiet is the eternal sleep / Of your warrior’s grave’’ (ll. 28–30). Does this mean that Kutuzov refuses to answer and that there is no help for Russia? The silence itself should be interpreted as a sign; this is an absence the poet himself must fill by articulating the voice of Russia which he hears in the tomb.35 Armed with this sense of responsibility for crafting the voice of Russia, the poet produced his two more direct responses to the uprising. The other two poems confront Europe, but they encounter Poland as a near other with a vigorous life that Pushkin subtly writes into the relationship of sibling with Russia. Poland does not appear at all in ‘‘Before the Tomb,’’ but Pushkin devotes at least a full stanza to the ‘‘quarrel’’ in each of the other two more famous poems. In ‘‘To the Calumniators of Russia,’’ although he elevates the conflict as written into history on ‘‘these bloody tablets,’’ he also characterizes

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Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising it as ‘‘an old domestic quarrel, already measured by fate’’ and as an ‘‘unequal quarrel.’’36 Later he uses the phrase ‘‘familial hostility.’’ The most famous image from this poem is perhaps the ‘‘Slavic streams’’ (not even rivers, but ruch’i!) flowing into the ‘‘Russian sea’’; Pushkin also uses the derogatory word ‘‘liakh’’ for the Poles, and the eighteenth-century odic word ‘‘ross’’ to stand in for the Russians (this word appears in the third poem as well). Poland, with its claims to a European heritage and a status independent from Russia, is circumscribed by this family relationship, and Pushkin talks right past it to the Europeans whose anti-Russian speeches he wants to answer. By claiming Poland as a close sibling of Russia, he even includes it in the ‘‘us’’ whom the Europeans hate: ‘‘Senselessly you are attracted / By the courage in our desperate struggle / And you hate us . . .’’ Poland had thrown her lot in with Napoleon during the war of 1812, hoping to achieve separate statehood. Thus Poland shares the rebuke offered to Europe in ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’ when Pushkin writes that Russia ‘‘turned its breast to the onslaught / Of the tribes serving that proud will, / And the unequal quarrel was equal.’’ With Pushkin it cannot be accidental that the same phrase, ‘‘unequal quarrel’’ (neravnyi spor) appears in the very next poem: European military force propped up Poland’s usual disadvantage, but Russia still prevailed. Poland appears further in the poem as ‘‘Warsaw fallen once again,’’ ‘‘Poland, like a fleeing regiment,’’ and the ‘‘crushed uprising.’’ Poland, pathetic in defeat, must accept the place allotted to it by Russian history: that of subordinate sibling. Pushkin asks incredulously (among other questions rhetorically designed to make a negative answer obvious), ‘‘Will our shabby golden-domed Kiev, / Ancestor to Russian cities, / Bring together with unruly Warsaw / The sacred place of all her graves?’’ Poland, by implication, does not have the historical status to merit such a union with Ukraine or ‘‘Little Russia.’’ In ‘‘To the Calumniators of Russia,’’ most of stanzas 3 through 6 are composed of provoking questions which both taunt Europe’s challenge to the wide Russian territory that defeated Napoleon and act as a historical primer for the reader: Pushkin lists the Kremlin and Boris Fedorovich Godunov’s defeat, Praga and Suvorov’s victory, the burning of Moscow, and the retreat of Napoleon. Prefiguring the geographical reach he would later claim in ‘‘Exegi monumentum’’ in 1836, he stretches Russia from Perm’ to the Taurides, from the cold Finnish cliffs to burning Colchis, from the Kremlin to the Great Wall of China. Poland itself disappears and becomes insignificant compared to the vast extent of the empire. Questions become assertions as Pushkin asks, using anaphora with the particle ‘‘il’,’’ ‘‘Has the word of the Russian tsar lost its power? Or is it new for us to quarrel with Europe? Or has the Russian lost the taste of victory? Or are there so few of us?’’ The pronoun ‘‘nas,’’ ‘‘we,’’ again links the poet-speaker firmly with the people or ‘‘narod’’ for whom he is speaking: he is becoming the ‘‘glas narodnoi very,’’ ‘‘nash vernyi glas.’’ The questioning ends with ‘‘will the Russian land not rise?’’ (that is, against European

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Megan Dixon invaders), a veiled prediction of what would happen if the European armies chose again to come onto Russian soil. The poet, speaking for his narod, both exhorts them to action and promises their response to the European enemy. In the final poem, ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino,’’ the poet still links himself with the wider voice he is articulating by his use of the pronoun ‘‘we.’’37 The first two stanzas of the poem repeat a prophecy that Russians spoke to one another on the anniversary of the Borodino battle during the height of the Polish uprising; the word ‘‘budet ’’ twice indicates their confidence in future victory. This prophecy is followed immediately by the word ‘‘sbylos’,’’ ‘‘it was fulfilled.’’ Stanza 6 asks ironically whether Russia should pull back its wide borders to please Europe, naming places that were historically contested by Russia and Poland: the Bug and Vorskla rivers, Liman, Volhynia, Lithuania, Kiev.38 The answers to these questions are yet more questions: Cmytnzn zd pycckogo bzaæqky? Ckaånte, kto gzabo∞ øohnk? Komy beheu: meœy nzd kpnky? Cnzdha zn Pycd? (ll. 62–65)

Did they disturb the Russian leader? Tell us, who lowered his head? Who wins the wreath: sword or shout? Is Russia not strong?

The answers are clear: the poet has spoken.39 The two poems ‘‘To the Calumniators of Russia’’ and ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’ have become the ‘‘glas’’ sought by the people, and the enunciation of Russia’s sacred power. In line 73 Pushkin writes, ‘‘Gremi, vostorgov obshchii glas!’’—‘‘Ring out, general voice of ecstasy!’’40 His poetry has united with that voice. Yet Pushkin also wants to hear the general voice. In stanza 8, he calls out to Russia (which has been called both Rus’ and Rossiia through the poem) to arise and stand proudly: ‘‘vstan’ i vozvyshaisia!’’ His rehearsal of rebukes to Europe and the triumph of Russia is supposed to produce a pride in self in which all can join. Pushkin also describes the way Russia will treat Poland—and also perhaps his conception of the defeated uprising. The fourth stanza of ‘‘The Anniversary’’ outlines what Pushkin thinks he is doing, and also implies what a poet should do under the circumstances. The ten-line stanza recapitulates the eight-line penultimate stanza of ‘‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo,’’ in which the poet praised the olive branch extended by victorious Russians in Paris: ‘‘the Ross [Russian] with a smile of reconciliation / Comes with a golden olive branch.’’ An even more broad claim is made later in the stanza that ‘‘[the Ross] brings the enemy not destruction, but salvation / And to the earth—wonderworking peace.’’ Similarly, almost twenty years later in ‘‘The Anniversary,’’ Pushkin claims, ‘‘Those fallen in the struggle are unharmed; / We did not trample the enemy in the dust; . . . / We will not burn their Warsaw.’’ The other three claims made in the stanza relate to the historical positioning of each nation. First, the Russians will not remind the Poles of what the annals hold in their ‘‘mute testimonies.’’ Second, Poland will not see the ‘‘furious face of the national Nemesis,’’ or justice. Finally, the Poles will not hear a song of scorn

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Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising from the lyre of the Russian poet (‘‘I ne uslyshat pesn’ obidy / Ot liry russkogo pevtsa’’). Clearly the voice Pushkin has developed in these poems sees the Polish uprising and a written response to the Russian victory as historically inscribed situations, with both parties defined in distinct ways. The poet’s voice claims to be a mere observer and recorder of the historic conflict between Russia and Poland; the action he calls for is the self-recognition of Russia as a powerful nation with a leading historical role to play. Russia should arise and rejoice over the victory, while ‘‘proud Warsaw’’ should remain quiet. When we recall Anderson’s invocation of tombs as one of the most salient sites of nationalist imagination, the book ending of Pushkin’s trilogy with tombs links the poems even more strongly to the performance of national identity. We begin with Kutuzov’s tomb in ‘‘Before the Sacred Tomb’’ and end with Suvorov’s tomb in ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’: Bocctab n≥ gpova cboego, Cybopob bnænt øzeh Bapwabq Boctpeøetaza tehd ego Ot vzecka nm haœato∞ czabq!

Risen from his grave, Suvorov sees the capture of Warsaw. His shade trembles From the brilliance of the glory he began!

Although these are not the empty Tombs of Unknown Soldiers to which Anderson points, they are still ‘‘saturated with ghostly national imaginings,’’41 as well as the desired unifying ecstasy.

Contemporary Reactions Pushkin’s attempts to craft a convincing public voice in the poems was well received by many people.42 Petr Chaadaev approved of these poems wholeheartedly; he wrote to Pushkin in French, ‘‘My friend, never have you given me such pleasure. Finally you are a national poet; you have finally divined your mission. . . . The piece to the enemies of Russia is most admirable; it is I who tell you this.’’43 Pushkin had shared the recognition that Russia needed a uniting voice in earlier poems, such as ‘‘To Chaadaev’’ (‘‘Chaadaevu,’’ 1818), where he assured his friend that ‘‘we hear the call of the fatherland’’ (‘‘otchizny vnemlem prizyvan’e’’). His positioning within Russia made the need for a national conversation more obvious and urgent to him than Poland’s need for freedom; ironically, although Poland was under Russian domination, Pushkin must have perceived Russia as needing a similarly vigorous injection of national identity building. Petr Viazemskii and Aleksandr Turgenev strongly disapproved of the poems. Turgenev wrote to his brother Nicholas of the ‘‘disputes’’ between Viazemskii and Pushkin over the poems.44 Lednicki cites a letter from Alexander Turgenev to his brother: ‘‘As a poet he believes that without Russian patriotism—as he conceives it—one can’t be a poet, and for the sake of poetry he doesn’t want to abandon his barbarism.’’45 This perception of the link between Russian ‘‘patriotism’’ and poetry also reveals the aspect of Pushkin’s

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Megan Dixon attempt that Turgenev could not accept: too much Russian national feeling was already ‘‘barbarity.’’ Viazemskii and Turgenev felt this way because of their sympathy for liberal political ideals, and, in Viazemskii’s case, for Poland and Poles in particular. Yet it is clear from a reading of Pushkin’s poems that Poland is in them an imagined place; he feels no such concrete sympathy. The space Russia refuses to cede (including the territory of Poland) is also the space it demands on which to work out its identity without hindrance. Pushkin, similarly, demands the national space in which to work out his own identity, unhampered by romantic ideas of Poland’s right to freedom. Fedotov explained Pushkin’s attitude in this way: ‘‘in his insensitivity to Poland, to her national wound, Pushkin, like the Decembrists, belongs entirely to the eighteenth century.’’46 More precisely we could say that he belongs to Russia: as mentioned, he never went beyond its borders, although he often longed to. Yet Pushkin had ‘‘been’’ to Poland before—in his drama Boris Godunov, written in 1826. Discussing the psychology of the Pretender, whom she links with Pushkin, Caryl Emerson writes an illuminating description of what Poland represented in that play: The Pretender . . . celebrates his multiple identities. The locus for this multiplicity is Poland: the land of elected monarchs, independent nobles, the individual as a creator of destiny. In Pushkin’s play the Poles are a colorful cultural alternative to Russia. . . . His Dmitri is an opportunist pure and simple. . . . he merely wishes to maximize his passion and his freedom, and Poland is that opportunity. The West is adventure space.47

The appearances of ‘‘Poland’’ in Pushkin’s Polish uprising poems are notably destabilizing: as ‘‘the Lithuanian troubles,’’ ‘‘the haughty Liakh,’’ and in the place-names of Praga and ‘‘tempestuous’’ Warsaw. As noted, in these references Poland is transformed into a troublesome younger cousin—or an unstable space whose further development matters less than that of Russia. Pushkin conveniently forgets Poland’s heritage of cultural traditions in his poems, including the poetic traditions that influenced the development of Russian letters. What else did Poland itself imply for Pushkin? Behind Pushkin’s thoughts of Poland stands also the presence of Adam Mickiewicz. Pushkin treated Mickiewicz as a companion in the grand endeavor of poetry and claimed to think of him in a category different from other Poles. In fact, he wrote to Sofia Khitrovo in January 1831, ‘‘Of all Poles, only Mickiewicz interests me.’’48 He mentions Mickiewicz rarely, but as a large body of scholarship has shown, many of Pushkin’s works used works by Mickiewicz as crucial interlocutors, for example, ‘‘In the Sweet Cool of Fountains’’ (1828), Poltava (1829), Tazit (1830), ‘‘Budrys and His Sons’’ (1833), The Bronze Horseman (1833), and ‘‘Egyptian Nights’’ (1835).49 The interlocutors were some of Mickiewicz’s most politically biting texts (such as Konrad Wallenrod for Poltava and Tazit, 62

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising Forefathers’ Eve for The Bronze Horseman), so Pushkin must have been aware of that provocation. He saw Mickiewicz as a brilliant and valued contemporary, but he did not approve of the Polish poet’s style of involvement in the public sphere. In 1834, Pushkin wrote that the Polish poet had gone to the West and there filled his verses with poison: ‘‘Our peaceful guest has become our enemy—and with poison, / To please the rabble, he fills / His verses.’’50 Mickiewicz, then, was not guiding public opinion, as Pushkin hoped to do, but was making himself a slave to the ‘‘rabble’’ (buinaia chern’). Pushkin imagined that he could craft his own position differently, and the Polish uprising gave him the opening. In another letter to Khitrovo in December 1830, Pushkin explained further what he did not like about the Polish approach to the uprising. He wrote, ‘‘We are too powerful to hate them; the war about to begin will be a war of extermination—or at least ought to be. Love of homeland (patrie), such as it can exist in a Polish soul, has always been a gloomy sentiment ( funèbre). Look at their poet Mickiewicz.’’51 Against this extravagant, desperate, overly romantic resistance, Pushkin places the historical strength and certainty of Russia. His disinclination to romanticize events is confirmed in his letter to Prince Viazemskii in 1831 describing one of the battles between the Russians and Poles: ‘‘This is all very well in the poetic sense. But nevertheless it is necessary to choke them off, and our delay is unbearable.’’52 Pushkin’s conclusion reflects pragmatism: for Russia to develop properly, Poland must submit. However, it is Poland’s resistance that allows this Russian self-vision to take shape. Specifically the external crisis gave Pushkin a chance to offer his talents. At the time of the Polish uprising, Pushkin also applied to the tsar for permission to found a journal, if only to counteract the publications of the Western European press and to defend Russia as she deserved. In a letter to Aleksandr Khristoforovich Benckendorf in July 1831, Pushkin wrote that ‘‘my inaction has long been a burden to me’’ (‘‘mne davno bylo tiagostno moe bezdeistvie’’) and that ‘‘general opinion must be guided’’ (‘‘obshchee mnenie imeet nuzhdu byt’ upravliaemo’’).53 In this context, Pushkin’s poems rebuking the crowd for its inability to understand poetry are also rebukes for the crowd’s incapacity to recognize him as the voice that should be heeded—not according to the people’s pleasure but according to what he judged right to say. In the same letter to Benckendorf, Pushkin sent assurances to the tsar that ‘‘around [a political journal] I would unite [soedinil by] talented writers and in this way would bring closer to the government useful people [liudei poleznykh] who avoid it now, vainly supposing it to be unfriendly to education.’’ These indicators of Pushkin’s deep concern for his public stature and effect on society cannot permit neglect of his comments about publicistic action. Vasilii Rozanov called Pushkin’s founding of The Contemporary in 1836 as evidence of his ‘‘extreme greed [krainaia zhadnost’]’’ to achieve some public efficacy.54 Pushkin’s failure to gain the public efficacy he sought seems clear proof that he had chosen a wrong path. Sergei Uvarov wrote to Pushkin on Octo63

Megan Dixon ber 8, 1831, praising the poems as ‘‘truly national’’ (istinno narodnye); this would seem to align them with the coming policy and earn Pushkin credit with the government. Yet Uvarov’s letter also includes an ‘‘imitation’’ of ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’—actually a nearly exact translation. Uvarov, explaining his poem, writes of himself in third person: ‘‘He did not hide from himself all the danger of battle with you, but, inspired by you, wanted one more time . . . to sharpen his European bayonet.’’ By translating Pushkin’s poem and offering it as an imitation—a form that implies more authorship than does a pure translation—Uvarov essentially usurped the force of Pushkin’s own poem. This official appropriation of his national voice forced Pushkin to write meekly back on October 21, ‘‘My verses served you as a simple theme for the development of a brilliant variation [ fantaziia]. It remains for me to thank you from my heart for the attention you have shown me.’’55 Instead of being accepted as an equal or as a guiding voice, Pushkin has become merely ‘‘a simple theme.’’ At about the same time, Pushkin wrote a letter to Benckendorf asking for permission to publish some of his poems. In January 1831, expressing his gratitude for publication of Boris Godunov, Pushkin wrote to Benckendorf of ‘‘the freedom boldly offered to Russian writers by the monarch at such a time and in such circumstances, when any other government would be trying to restrict and shackle publication.’’56 This sentence reveals Pushkin’s efforts to educate the tsar and persuade him to offer freedom during the Polish uprising. In October 1831, Pushkin stated that the tsar had promised to ‘‘rely on [him],’’ and repeats his bid for individual responsibility and freedom by claiming that ‘‘[the tsar’s] high trust places on me the obligation of being the strictest of censors in relation to myself ’’; Benckendorf ’s answer on October 19 reinforced the rigid censorship over Pushkin’s work, and offered him no extra personal space earned by his Polish uprising poems.57 Clearly the government censors did not believe these poems to have transformed Pushkin into a ‘‘safe’’ writer; if they were meant to achieve this, then they were a failure. Pushkin’s longstanding personal attachment to the poems (recall his letter to Golitsyn in 1836) has to be explained another way. What Pushkin creates in the poems is not just partisan poetry, not just anti-Polish propaganda, but the elevated voice of historical necessity. The poems reflect Pushkin’s desire to pull the cultural center of gravity eastward, closer to Russia and away from exclusive location in Europe.58 Ironically it is again Poland’s stubborn uprising against Russian rule that gave Russia, and by extension Pushkin, the opportunity to make this desired shift in gravity visible to the rest of Europe and to Russian society. There is evidence that the Polish uprising fueled Pushkin’s construction specifically of his poetic self. The fragment written to A. O. Rosset in 1831, ‘‘From you I learned of the fall of Warsaw,’’ makes another link between the events and poetry. The news about Poland’s defeat directly prompts the inspiration of the poet:

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Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising Ot bac y≥haz r øzeh Bapwabq. **** Bq vqzn becthnue« czabq N bæoxhobehdem æzr mehr.59

From you I learned of Warsaw’s fall. **** You were the herald of glory And an inspiration for me.

This fragment, like Pushkin’s letter to Prince Golitsyn, indicates that he exulted in the experience of writing poems in response to a national crisis. In this case, the ‘‘inspiration’’ comes partly from the energy of standing at the intersection of personal poetic performance and national need. The disputes between Viazemskii and Pushkin most probably raged over the appropriateness of poets involving themselves in political matters in this way. Pushkin concluded that the unremitting attack on Russia by the French press required a vigorous answer, and since French poets were involved (Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Jean-François-Casimir Delavigne), ‘‘[Pushkin] designated above all ‘Russian writers’ as those upon whom it was incumbent to defend the homeland.’’60 Against the purported melodrama of Polish and French writing, Pushkin places himself as the poet who works to craft a sober natural unity for his country. Thus a crucial aspect in the writing of the poems was still the literary opportunity for Pushkin to assert that his was still the poetic voice that other poets and the nation should listen to.61

Fighting with Poland Pushkin described himself as ‘‘personnellement attaché de coeur à l’empéreur’’ despite seeing faults in the court.62 While identifying himself with Russian cultural display—including court life—Pushkin explored avenues for expressing independence, enjoying the risk of creative departure from a fixed cultural identity. It was precisely the complex challenge of operating in this arena that drew Pushkin. Referring briefly to such texts as the poems of the Polish uprising, Monika Greenleaf describes ‘‘Pushkin’s incurable ‘barbarism’ when it came to questions of Russia’s military might’’;63 as I have shown, Pushkin’s poems reveal not so much barbarism as a committed positioning on Russian soil, which in part outlines the point of view he will take. They also reveal, however, a need for the encounter with Poland as a motivator for more poetry. This encounter, while not an outright confrontation with Poland, has combative elements that had emerged earlier in ‘‘To Count Olizar.’’ The attraction of writing the poems of the Polish uprising did not lie in single-handedly changing the tide of either Russian or French opinion. Pushkin asserts his capacity to judge his own abilities as a poet, and what a poet could appropriately do with his skill and the power of his words. He found independence in competing with others’ expectations of him. Ironically, in Emerson’s phrasing, as cited above, Pushkin ‘‘wishes to maximize his passion and his freedom, and Poland is that opportunity.’’ Mickiewicz had en-

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Megan Dixon countered Russia on its own soil during his five-year stay in Moscow and St. Petersburg; his biographers have noted the transformation in him that exile in Russia helped to accomplish. Pushkin was unable to go to Poland to confront Mickiewicz and what Poland represented; he had to use his texts in order to craft the battles that would shape him. The sharpness of the attack in the poems of the Polish uprising is not unusual for Pushkin; his epigrams also offer examples of vigorous self-defense in words. Indeed, they offer a context for a combative, competitive streak in Pushkin. Even in writing ‘‘The Prophet,’’ Pushkin was probably competing with similar poems written by Glinka and Kiukhel’beker. In the eighteenth century poets competed in translating the Psalms, the kind of texts that were surely a direct influence on Glinka and Kiukhel’beker: Alexander Levitsky writes, ‘‘Psalms were frequently used as the means for a literary dialogue or as a vehicle of literary competition.’’64 Pushkin’s version of a poem on the death of Byron also differed strongly from the several others written by his friends. He is the greater poet in most cases, but still felt a need to maintain that position with more proof of his ability. Ian Helfant insightfully discusses Pushkin’s competitiveness in gambling and the way that ‘‘Pushkin viewed his gambling as a means of social self-positioning’’; similarly the poems of the Polish uprising, which demonstrate Pushkin’s virtuosity in this genre as in many others, place him once again as poetic victor.65 Wiktor Woroszylski suggests that ‘‘in defense of his own attitude—whatever causes may have sometime formed it—[Pushkin] felt the need to condemn the opposing attitude’’ (404–405). The Polish biographer saw this tendency in ‘‘With Enlightenment You Cleared Your Reason,’’ a fragment first published in 1903 by I. A. Shliapkin, which reproached an unknown Russian for his lack of national feeling during Russia’s setbacks during the Polish uprising (‘‘You rubbed your hands at the news of our reverses, / You listened to the news with a sly laugh’’) and for his sorrow at her triumph (‘‘You lowered your head and sobbed bitterly, / Like the Jew for Jerusalem’’).66 Gleb Struve moderates Woroszylski’s perception, asserting that ‘‘the interesting thing about Pushkin’s epistle [’With Enlightenment’] is its friendly tone. There is no animosity toward the man who hated his own people and loved foreign nations’’ (451). This suggests not that Pushkin felt jovial in his opposition to Poland but that this competitiveness formed a vital part of his character, and that Pushkin himself was not vindictive about his animosities. The animosities were there, they were necessary to him, and they often inhabit the same spaces as his statements of transcending merely ‘‘national’’ culture. A cheerful voice in Pushkin’s ‘‘Conversation about Criticism’’ (‘‘Razgovor o kritike’’) had agreed in around 1830 that even the fistfights between critics (kulachnye boitsy) piqued his curiosity: ‘‘Why ever not? Our boyars enjoyed them [Nashi boiare imi teshilis’].’’ The thrill of battle was part of the energy in Pushkin’s creative process. His confrontation with Poland propelled him into the position of national poet and confirmed his sense of poetic mastery. 66

Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising However, the poems’ fate in literary criticism reveals the fragile positioning of Pushkin’s efforts.67 Pushkin tried to craft a voice that would unite the best elements of Russian historical consciousness and confidence, but the line he tried to follow was—at least publicly—too fine, too unstable for his efforts. Although Pushkin maintained that he wanted only ‘‘the good of Russian letters’’ and that the Poles would hear no insulting song from him, readers could not but notice the Polish bones, the dissolution of the Slavic streams into the Russian sea, and the standards cast into the dust (in ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’). Not only did his poems allow a deeply critical interpretation from the oppositional elements in Russian society, Pushkin’s poems did not strike his close friends as a model for an elevating, self-respecting patriotism. The poems also did not convince the ‘‘governmental patriots’’ to poeticize their rhetoric and raise it from ‘‘zoological nationalism’’ to historical symbolism. In the poems Pushkin confronted one of Russia’s rivals, Europe, and crafted another encounter with Polish culture. For him personally the resulting sense of competition produced creative energy. Yet even as the poems show Pushkin battling with his rival as he pictured him, it is clear that the Russian poet sees what he wants to see. His partisan concern with Russia’s historical role prevented him from imagining another outcome for Poland— the separate statehood that she eventually would gain. Since Pushkin was placed within Russia and wrote about the uprising from afar, his encounter with Poland could remain only at the level of appropriation—he could not let the encounter fully transform him, as arguably happened with Mickiewicz who spent time knowing Russians on Russian soil. The Poland that gave Pushkin the space in which to explore his public position in Russia was largely imagined, and therefore never fully conquerable. For Dostoevsky, Pushkin was the ‘‘universally responsive’’ poet, but the view of Pushkin provided by the poems of the Polish uprising confirms that Pushkin was a poet combatively, vigorously rooted in Russia. NOTES 1. Although they are frequently called Pushkin’s ‘‘anti-Polish trilogy,’’ it seems appropriate to label them more neutrally as the ‘‘poems of the Polish uprising,’’ since they are openly more anti-European. A. V. Kushakov describes them as ‘‘anti-Bonapartist’’ and calls them simply ‘‘the trilogy.’’ See his Pushkin i Pol’sha (Tula: Priokskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1990), 79–89. Two other poems, more accurately fragments, may be considered as part of the same cycle: ‘‘From Notes to A. O. Rosseti’’ (‘‘Iz zapisok k A. O. Rosset,’’ 1831) and ‘‘With Enlightenment You Illumined Your Reason’’ (‘‘Ty prosveshchen’em svoi razum osvetil,’’ (1831–1835). I discuss them briefly in this essay. 2. I use the name ‘‘Poland’’ advisedly, partly in order to avoid lengthy discussions of the various geographical manifestations of the Polish lands. The Polish uprising of 1830 took place in Warsaw, the center of Russian-controlled partitioned Poland—although the land partitioned had been the Commonwealth, not just ‘‘Polska’’; ‘‘Poland,’’ how-

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Megan Dixon ever, also in the end refers to the modern Poland that produced Pushkin scholars cited in this article. 3. L. Frizman, ‘‘Pushkin i Pol’skoe Vosstanie 1830–1831 godov. Neskol’ko vstupitel’nyx slov,’’ Voprosy literatury 3 (1992): 209–37, 234. 4. The letter (written in French) reads: ‘‘A thousand times thank you, dear Prince, for your incomparable translation of my poem. . . . If only you had translated this poem at a more opportune time, I would have gotten it sent to France to give a rap on the nose to all those vociferators in the Chamber of Deputies.’’ See A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. B. Tomashevsky, 10 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1956– 58), 10:601; hereafter, PSS. All citations are from this edition unless otherwise noted. All translations in the article are my own, unless otherwise noted. 5. See Cynthia Whittaker, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov. 1786–1855 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984), 94–110, for an excellent discussion of Uvarov’s proposed ‘‘principles of development.’’ Benedict Anderson mentions Uvarov’s policy but has the third term as ‘‘national’nost’’’ instead of ‘‘narodnost’.’’ He usefully points out that Russification as a policy did not go into effect in Poland until significantly after the Polish uprising; he mentions the reign of Alexander III. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 87). Whittaker provides a detailed discussion of Russification in Poland, according to which the process began in the late 1830s to early 1840s (Origins of Modern Russian Education, 191–99). 6. Waclaw Lednicki, Pouchkine et la Pologne: à propos de la trilogie antipolonaise (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1928), 154; see also, for example, 107, 127. Lednicki also has material on the Polish uprising poems in his studies in Polish: Aleksander Puszkin: Studia (Kraków: Nak™. Krakowskiej Spó™ki Wydawniczej, 1926), and Przyjaciele Moskale (Kraków: Gebethner and Wolff, 1935). 7. Susan Layton’s book has been instrumental in providing tools for analyzing Russia’s imperial activity as it played out in literature; see Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). She and Harsha Ram (see n. 26, below) have discussed above all Pushkin’s southern poems, especially the epilogue to The Prisoner of the Caucasus; neither discusses Poland at length or mentions the Polish uprising poems. 8. Among Polish scholars, Wiktor Woroszylski called them ‘‘sudden artistic mush [mizeria]’’ and ‘‘embarrassing banality’’; see idem, Kto zabi™ Puszkina? (Warsaw: Iskry, 1983). Waclaw Lednicki called them ‘‘the cruel nationalistic cynicism of Pushkin’’ (Pouchkine et la Pologne, 39) and ‘‘a gesture unworthy of a great poet’’ (127). 9. See ‘‘O nichtozhestve literatury russkoi’’ (1834), PSS, 7:306. 10. Robert Pinsky writes that the artist ‘‘needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond. . . . This need to answer . . . is the ground where the centaur walks.’’ See idem, ‘‘Responsibilities of the Poet,’’ in Poetry and the World (New York: Ecco, 1988), 85; cited in Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), xiv. 11. Woroszylski wrote that Pushkin’s endurance of continual government suspicion left him in ‘‘a state of dull irritation’’ (Kto zabi™ Puszkina? 384). He concludes: ‘‘the November Uprising of the Poles brought a change. It gave the Russian poet an opportunity to manifest patriotic solidarity, which on the one hand did not demand that he

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Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising abandon anything that he held dear, and on the other offered the chance to be on a common front with the part of society not under suspicion’’ (385). 12. See David Bethea, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 153. 13. See V. A. Frantsev, Pushkin i Pol’skoe Vosstanie 1830–1831 (Prague: Politika, 1929), 57; see also Frizman, ‘‘Pushkin i Pol’skoe Vosstanie,’’ 234 n. 74. 14. Olga Murav’eva, ‘‘ ‘Vrazhdy bessmyslennoi pozor’: Oda ‘Klevetnikam Rossii’ v otsenkakh sovremennikov,’’ in Novyi mir 6 (1994): 198–204; 202. 15. A. V. Kushakov, Pushkin i Pol’sha, 83. Compare also Tomashevsky: the poems were written at a time when ‘‘the questions of patriotism and national pride were not . . . abstract concepts. . . . Pushkin saw the falsity of [Zagoskin’s novel Roslavlev] with its misanthropic, zoological interpretation of significant historical events, with its governmental [kazennyi] patriotism.’’ Pushkin also despised the ‘‘false patriotism of society circles.’’ See B. Tomashevsky, Pushkin, 2 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1961), 2:143–44. 16. Bhabha uses these two terms more in relation to the response of the colonized to the colonizers, but the concepts of sedimented, established ‘‘pedagogy’’ and recursive, strategic ‘‘performance’’ can help even here to distinguish two aspects of shaping national identity that illuminate the case of Pushkin. See Homi Bhabha, ‘‘DissemiNation,’’ in Nation and Narration, ed. idem, 291–322 (New York: Routledge, 1990), 297, 299. 17. What in this paragraph might seem apologetic is my attempt to recover ‘‘the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation’’ like Russian nationalism (Edward Said, Orientalism [New York: Random House, 1978], 23). I see in Pushkin’s poems of the Polish uprising what Said called a ‘‘dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution’’ (24). 18. Geoffrey Hosking writes of an ‘‘ ‘imperial’ national consciousness’’ which had as its foundation loyalties to home and school; he writes that ‘‘Pushkin was the bard of this imperial patriotism.’’ The poems of the Polish uprising can be seen as an attempt to expand the basis for such patriotism beyond ‘‘attachments . . . to their family, their school or college, and their regiment.’’ See Geoffrey Hosking, Empire and Nation in Russian History, Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures (Waco, Tex.: Markham Press Fund, 1993), 14. 19. Murav’eva, ‘‘ ‘Vrazhdy bessmyslennoi pozor,’ ’’ 199. 20. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, e.g., 134–35. 21. See ‘‘Razgovor o kritike’’ (1830), PSS, 7:100–101. 22. Georgii Fedotov makes a relevant point in his article ‘‘Pevets imperii i svobody,’’ reprinted in Pushkin v russkoi filosofskoi kritike, ed. R. A. Gal’tseva (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 356–75. He writes that ‘‘[Pushkin’s] retreat from the revolution stems not from his disillusionment with freedom, but with the people as an unworthy bearer of freedom’’ (370). 23. For such a reading, see Vadim Vatsuro, ‘‘ ‘Prorok,’ ’’ Zapiski kommentatora (Sankt-Peterburg: Gumanitarnoe agenstvo ‘‘Akademicheskii proekt,’’ 1994), 7–16. 24. See Bethea, Realizing Metaphors, 173. 25. PSS, 1:86, 88. 26. PSS, 2:226–27. 27. Harsha Ram, ‘‘Russian Poetry and the Imperial Sublime,’’ in Russian Subjects:

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Megan Dixon Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age, ed. Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 21–49; quotes at 24 and 23. Ram writes that Pushkin ‘‘repeatedly defers Russia’s final victory’’ in the epilogue to The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which similarly ‘‘has struck most readers as aesthetically aberrant if not ideologically abhorrent’’ (48). The clear victory in the poems of the Polish uprising requires some qualification of the conclusion that Pushkin offers only ‘‘dissent’’ to what Ram calls the ‘‘imperial sublime.’’ 28. Kushakov writes: ‘‘In 1830 and 1831, Pushkin thought about Poland and the Polish question above all as a military-patriotic theme. Therefore he in his thoughts and in his work often juxtaposed 1830–1831 with 1812. Such juxtapositions called forth in the poet’s mood and works acute feelings of indignation against that part of aristocratic society, which in 1812 and 1830–1831 did not take to heart either the woes or the glory of the fatherland, which remained either indifferent or even maliciously satisfied by the complications in Russia’s relations with France and Europe’’ (Pushkin i Pol’sha, 83). 29. The parallel here goes even deeper: Suvorov defeated Polish resistance in Warsaw in 1794 with the ‘‘massacre of Praga,’’ an eastern suburb of Warsaw. The defeat of the same area on August 26, 1831, allowed the Russians to proclaim victory once again. 30. Y. Stennik, Pushkin i russkaia literatura XVIII veka (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995), 314. 31. Compare the rigorous genre analysis of Anna Lisa Crone, ‘‘What Derzhavin Heard When Pushkin Read ‘Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele’ in 1815,’’ Pushkin Review 2 (1999): 1–24. See also Ram’s comments on the epilogue to The Prisoner of the Caucasus as odic, and Viazemskii’s objections (see note 27 above); see also Bethea’s comments on ecstasy in Realizing Metaphors, 182 n. 96. 32. E. Pogosian, Vostorg russkoi ody i reshenie temy poeta v russkom panegirike 1730–1762gg. (Tartu: Kirjastus, 1997), 21. See particularly the introduction, 7–22. 33. This poem, to my knowledge, is not available in translation, so I provide the whole piece. The other two poems are more familiar, and so I do not provide extended quotations from them here. Waclaw Lednicki provides some of the most detailed commentary available on the poems in an appendix in his Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman: The Story of a Masterpiece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 101–108. He provides translations of the second and third poems in the ‘‘trilogy,’’ and his footnotes for each of those two poems are excellent. 34. PSS, 3:220–21. Lednicki notes Pushkin’s ‘‘solemn and archaic language’’ and ‘‘powerful epic tableaux and historical symbols’’ (Pouchkine, 44). Stennik also discusses Pushkin’s language at some length (Pushkin i russkaia literatura XVIII veka, esp. 312– 16). 35. Pogosian comments that ‘‘ ‘the voice of the people’ is a necessary condition for the government to be prosperous [neobkhodimoe uslovie blagopoluchnogo sostoianiia gosudarstva]’’ (Vostorg russkoi ody, 22). Quoting Donald Fanger’s biography of Gogol’, Whittaker writes that in the early 1830s ‘‘there existed a ‘sense of awakened expectation,’ a desire to discover ‘a collective national voice’.’’ Cited in Whittaker, Origins of Modern Russian Education, 104. 36. PSS, 3:222–23. 37. PSS, 3:224–26. 38. See Lednicki’s notes in Bronze Horseman on the specific historical significance of each of these references.

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Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising 39. Pushkin’s phrasing is similar here to rhetorical ‘‘questions’’ about God’s power in the Old Testament. A useful example comes from the book of Jeremiah, chapter 23: ‘‘Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off ? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord? Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord. Is not my word like a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?’’ (vv. 23, 24, 29). Cited from King James Version. We might notice that the only thing missing in Pushkin’s version of these rhetorical questions is the word ‘‘govorit ’’ or ‘‘saith.’’ 40. PSS, 3:226. 41. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9. 42. Lednicki, in Pouchkine et la Pologne, describes, for instance, the similarity of Pushkin’s rhetoric to articles written by Mikhail Pogodin, and the pro-Russian sympathies of Vasilii Zhukovskii, who also wrote a poem commemorating the end of the uprising. In ‘‘Pushkin i Pol’skoe Vosstanie,’’ Frizman, by contrast, lists the numerous educated Russians who sympathized with the Poles, including Herzen. 43. Cited in Lednicki, Pouchkine, 181. See P. Ia. Chaadaev, Stat’i i pis’ma (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 224. 44. Lednicki cites Turgenev’s letter of 1832: ‘‘I heard their arguments, but I kept silent, because Pushkin began to accuse Viazemskii while all the time justifying himself ’’ (Pouchkine, 170). See also A. Turgenev, Politicheskaia proza (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1989), 158–59. 45. Cited in Lednicki, Pouchkine, 170; see also Turgenev, Politicheskaia proza, 158. 46. Fedotov, ‘‘Pevets imperii i svobody,’’ 362. 47. Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 101–102. 48. PSS, 10:335. 49. I have written about the relationship between Pushkin and Mickiewicz in ‘‘Pushkin and Mickiewicz in Moral Profile,’’ Pushkin Review, no. 4 (2001): 15–36; and ‘‘Pushkin’s Failure in Polish Eyes; or, Why Read Adam Mickiewicz’s Lectures,’’ Pushkin Review, no. 5 (2005): 89–104. Selected relevant pieces are D. D. Blagoi, ‘‘Mitskevich i Pushkin,’’ in Ot Kantemira do nashikh dnei (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1979); S. Fiszman, ‘‘Mickiewicz i Puszkin’’ in American Contributions to the International Congress of Slavists (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1988), 139–54; N. V. Izmailov, ‘‘Mitskevich v stikhakh Pushkina (K interpretatsii stikhotvoreniia ‘V prokhlade sladostnoi fontanov’),’’ in Ocherki tvorchestva Pushkina (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 125–73; and W. Lednicki, ‘‘Pushkin’s Tazit and Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod,’’ in Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe, Turgenev, and Sienkiewicz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 180–97. 50. ‘‘On mezhdu nami zhil,’’ PSS, 3:279. Interestingly Frantsev asserts that ‘‘the chains of Imperial favor were heavier for Pushkin than those which morally tormented the Polish poet-exile [i.e., Mickiewicz], who did not experience this enslavement of thought and word’’ (Pushkin i Pol’skoe Vosstanie, 61). 51. PSS, 10:325. 52. PSS, 10:351. 53. See Lednicki, Pouchkine, 103. Lednicki cites only the rough draft of the letter: ‘‘Let it be permitted to us, Russian writers, to repel the shameless and ignorant attacks of the foreign press.’’ Lednicki does not comment on discrepancies between the drafts. For

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Megan Dixon the whole letter, see PSS, 10:639. In both the 1937 and 1956 Academy editions of Pushkin’s complete works, this letter is classified separately under ‘‘business papers’’ (delovye bumagi); see PSS, 10 (1956): 639, 655. The text appears as a ‘‘project for the publication of a journal and newspaper’’ in a prerevolutionary edition; see Sochineniia A. S. Pushkina, ed. P. A. Efremov, 3rd ed., 6 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Isakova, 1881), 5:186–89. From the diction of the text it appears that Pushkin began the letter in response to some overture from the tsar and Benckendorf; specific language concerning the Polish uprising does not remain in the final draft. Confirmation of Pushkin’s intention to found a journal right about this time can be found in the Complete Works (1937–1959) in a letter to Pushkin from Vigel’. Vigel’ wrote, ‘‘The project for a political and literary journal is charming, I have thought about it quite a bit. . . . Your project was communicated to [Uvarov] . . . he is delighted and will speak about it to General [Benckendorf ] whenever you like.’’ See A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, 16 vols. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1937–59), 14:202 (hereafter, PSS (1937–59). Lednicki notes that permission to start such a journal in support of the government was not given, although Pushkin was given permission in 1832 to publish Diary (Dnevnik) for a short time. See PSS, 10:757 n. 8. 54. V. Rozanov, ‘‘A. S. Pushkin,’’ in Pushkin v russkoi filosofskoi kritike. Konets XIX–pervaia polovina XX vv., ed. R. A. Gal’tseva (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 161–74; quote at 172. 55. For Uvarov’s letter and poem, see PSS (1937–59), 14:232–33; Pushkin’s letters can also be found in PSS, 10:386–87. 56. PSS, 10:333. 57. For Pushkin’s October letter see PSS, 10:386–87. For Benckendorf ’s reply, see PSS (1937–59), 14:233. 58. Pushkin asserted Russia’s worthiness to enter Europe on her own terms in a letter to Chaadaev in 1836: ‘‘we have had our own mission . . . will all this not be part of history, but merely a pale dream? Do you think that a future historian will not place us within Europe? . . . I swear to you on my honor that I would not change my country for anything in the world or have any other history than that of our ancestors’’ (PSS, 10:596–98). 59. PSS, 3:231. 60. See Lednicki, Pouchkine et la Pologne, 106. Viazemskii wrote to E. S. Khitrovo that ‘‘those in power, the social order, sometimes have grievous and bloody obligations to fulfill, but the poet, thank God, doesn’t have the obligation to celebrate them’’ (cited in Lednicki, Pouchkine et la Pologne, 165). 61. According to many, Pushkin’s authority among the wider public was beginning to be questioned by this time—at least, by rival critics (since the outpouring of sympathy at his funeral still bears witness to broad public popularity). See, for example, Bethea, Realizing Metaphors; or Leslie O’Bell, Pushkin’s ‘‘Egyptian Nights’’: The Biography of a Work (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), 98. 62. Fedotov, ‘‘Pevets imperii i svobody,’’ 361; PSS, 10:598. 63. Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 37–38. 64. See Alexander Levitsky, ‘‘The Sacred Ode in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977), 4. 65. Ian Helfant, The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), esp.

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Repositioning Pushkin and the Poems of the Polish Uprising 48–66; see 66. My first awareness of Pushkin’s sense of competition was sparked by hearing an early version of Helfant’s work on Pushkin and gambling, given in a paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in Toronto, Canada, December 28, 1997. 66. This translation is provided by Gleb Struve in his article, ‘‘Who Was Pushkin’s ‘Polonophil’?’’ Slavonic and East European Review 29 (1951): 444–55; see 444–45. For the Russian original, see PSS, 3:391. Its date is unknown; it is no earlier than 1831, although Struve places it in 1835. 67. Different geographical and temporal locations shaped critics’ responses. Pavel Annenkov called them ‘‘the height of patriotic inspiration [odushevleniia].’’ See his Kommentariii k materialam dlia biografii A. S. Pushkina. (Moscow: Izdatelstvo ‘‘Kniga,’’ 1985 [1855]), 318. Lednicki in interwar Poland produced his Pouchkine et la Pologne (see n. 6 above); V. A. Frantsev in emigration was still apologetic for the poems in his work (see Pushkin i Pol’skoe Vosstanie, 56, 63). Tomashevsky’s biography justifies the poems as efforts to craft a national patriotism but barely mention them. For the Polish topic that his own biography left out, Yuri Lotman sent Russian readers to read Woroszyski’s ‘‘wonderful book [prekrasnaia kniga].’’ See Yuri Lotman, ‘‘Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Biografiia pisatelia.. Predislovie k pol’skomu izdaniiu (1984),’’ in Lotmanovskii sbornik, ed. M. L. Gasparov, 2 vols. (Tartu: Izdatel’stvo ‘‘Its Garant,’’ 1995), 1:85–88; and Woroszylski, Kto zabi™ Puszkina? esp. 371–404.

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four

Appropriating Poland Glinka, Polish Dance, and Russian National Identity Halina Goldberg

The presence of characteristically Polish dance elements among what is deemed quintessentially Russian repertory is astounding—Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Scriabin all wrote a variety of polonaises and mazurkas. More significant, Polish elements abound in Russian operas: the most famous are the ‘‘Polish act’’ (act 3) of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and act 1 of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin. In fact, in the course of modern musical history, ‘‘defining Russia’’1 very frequently meant ‘‘appropriating Poland,’’ and the intersections of the conflicting readings that resulted from this process produced riveting paradoxes. Mikhail Glinka’s 1836 opera, A Life for the Tsar, is perhaps an example par excellence of the complex, multilayered function that the Polish element played in the articulation of Russianness. In this opera Polish dances serve, by denoting the malevolent Poles, as a means of constructing Russian national character. Yet the very same dances removed from the hermeneutic framework of the opera thrived as favorites in Russian salons, and the polonaise as a genre was appropriated to glorify the Russian nation. Nor was Glinka simply a Polonophobe, for while his musical articulation of Russian-Polish discord in 74

Appropriating Poland his opera made him a national hero, he himself maintained close contacts with Poles, whom he often addressed with affection through the very same dance genres (the mazurka). Ironically he also venerated Chopin, the most national Polish composer of that period, and considered himself Chopin’s musical heir. The plot of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Russia’s first national opera, centers on the Polish-Russian conflict of 1613 and the installation of the Romanovs as a dynasty. As the Poles are attempting to invest the Polish king on the Russian throne in Moscow, a Russian peasant, Ivan Susanin, lures the Polish troops away to their perdition, sacrificing his life in the process. Thus the peasant hero saves both his fatherland and the newly elected sixteen-yearold tsar Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov—founder of the dynasty that was to rule Russia for the next three hundred years. The entire opera speaks though Polish and Russian musical idioms. While Russians are characterized through the use of rhythmically flexible recitative/ arioso, lyrical arias and choruses alluding to Orthodox heterophony, the Poles are identified by the use of dances: the mazurka and the polonaise, in particular. The second act, describing the wicked plotting taking place in the Polish encampment, consists almost entirely of Polish dances; in the last (fourth) act, the raging Poles speak again through the rhythms of the mazurka. The dance element as a signifier of Polishness in this opera is so pervasive that even amid the early euphoric reception, one critic asked: ‘‘What kind of thinking is it that requires Poles to speak, think, and act to the accompaniment of the mazurka? Is it really possible that all the passions of this nation are confined to threequarter time and cannot be expressed in any other meter?’’2 That the opera was constructed on the two national characters was apparent to Glinka’s audiences. Count Mikhail Vielgorskii, one of Russia’s most gifted musical amateurs, commented that ‘‘from the beginning to end its character is exclusively Russian and Polish.’’3 The reviewers extolled Glinka’s newly found Russian musical language, his Russianness being not just a simple imitation of folk elements but a result of studying ‘‘the deep structure of Russian songs performed by the people themselves, these cries, the sharp changes from grave to lively, from loud to soft, the shading, surprises of every sort, and finally, the unique harmony and development of phrases, which are not based on accepted rules.’’4 Another comment written after the premiere read: It seems there were three things on which the composer’s understanding of national music was based: Russian songs (either in full, or reworked, or half and half with his own fantasies); liturgical music (mostly in the choruses); and the characterizing trait so explicitly and distinctly expressed in our songs—the exchange of grief and joy, festive gaiety, fluidity, and briskness.5

Moreover, Glinka was credited with the ability to ‘‘elevate Russian melody, by nature doleful, cheerful, or bold to a tragic style.’’6 75

Halina Goldberg Actually, both in Poland and in Russia, the national vocabulary of music was established much earlier, at the end of the previous century. It was not directly of rustic origin, but rather it was largely defined within urban aristocratic and intelligentsia circles and delivered to the rest of the nation as the ‘‘newly discovered folk music.’’ In Russia this was accomplished primarily through the song arrangements of Lvov and Prach and the inclusion of stylized folk genres in Evstignei Ipat’evich Fomin’s singspiel Postal Coachmen at the Relay Station (Iamshchiki na podstave, 1787).7 In Poland the numerous collections of krakowiaks, polonaises, and mazurkas, as well as operas saturated with folklore, in particular Jan Stefani’s Krakowiacy i Górale of 1794 and Karol Kurpinski’s ´ Nowe Krakowiaki of 1816, provided the same ‘‘urban folk sources’’ for Chopin and his generation.8 Notwithstanding the apparent similarities, in the 1830s Poland and Russia employed these national constructs to fulfill very different objectives. The desire to maintain cultural autonomy under foreign rule, mainly through the articulation of a Polish national identity, was the primary stimulus for the proliferation of krakowiaks, mazurkas, and polonaises. This necessity came clearly into play at the end of the eighteenth century, just after Poland— partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia—ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. A nation without borders desperately needed national music. Though at first glance Glinka was motivated by a similar search for national identity, in Russia the concept of ‘‘national culture’’ was much more complex. It has been asserted, mainly by Richard Taruskin, that A Life for the Tsar embraced nationalism not in the modern sense, but in a very narrow sense of Official Nationalism.9 In 1833, Count Sergei Uvarov, Nicholas I’s minister of education, proclaimed the doctrine known as Official Nationality, according to which the fundamental values upheld by all Russians were to be Orthodoxy (pravoslavie), autocracy (samoderzhavie), and nationality (narodnost’)—all three embodied in the person of the tsar. Autocracy was meant to affirm the tsar’s absolute power; Orthodoxy referred to the official Church and its part in shaping state-endorsed morality; and nationality denoted the particular character of the Russian people and their role as the supporter of the sovereign.10 The propagation of Official Nationality as a state dogma intensified the process of constructing national identity through endeavors such as the establishment of university professorships in Slavonic studies or the creation of the Archaeographic Commission, which took over the research aimed at establishing Russia’s historical identity. To further support Taruskin’s claims, it is important to point out that in setting the tenor for the determination of Russianness, the state encouraged the exclusion of non-Russian inhabitants of the empire from full citizenship. To that end, new policies were articulated against the Polish gentry, promoting the non-Polish peasants in an effort to claim the empire’s western provinces as historically Russian.11 An opera validating the Romanovs as absolute rulers of Russia perfectly suited Emperor Nicholas’s needs, and the story of A Life for the Tsar not only bestowed a new kind of 76

Appropriating Poland dignity upon a Russian peasant, but it also vilified the Polish gentry. To boot, this particular narrative, recalling the humiliating occupation of Moscow by Polish forces, emphasized the historic military threat Poland posed to Russia and thus served to justify the severe political measures toward Poland that followed the collapse of the November Uprising in 1831. The trail linking the opera with the official court circles is clear. The first person with whom Glinka discussed the libretto for this opera was the poet Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovskii, who was the tutor of the tsarevich (the future Alexander II). Ultimately the libretto was written by the German-born Baron Egor (Georg) Fedorovich Rozen, who was Alexander’s secretary. As the opera was being created, excerpts from it were performed during soirees at the imperial court, and shortly before opening night the emperor himself attended one of the rehearsals at the theater.12 Naturally Nicholas I and his family were present at the premiere, and after the performance Glinka was called to the imperial box to be thanked for his opera. In return for service well performed, he was later granted permission to dedicate the opera to the tsar, but the sovereign demanded that the title Ivan Susanin, originally preferred by the composer, be replaced by A Life for the Tsar.13 All these facts support Taruskin’s belief that in this opera Glinka and Rozen conceived of nationalism in dynastic and religious terms, as it served the interests of Nicholas I. However, having acknowledged the opera’s connections to Nicholas’s propaganda apparatus, we must also examine other contexts and contemporary readings of this work, disregarded by Taruskin, namely that several professors and writers who were proponents of Official Nationality, including a number of intellectuals closely involved with the creation of Glinka’s opera, professed to a quite different concept of nationality: a romantic longing for a special role Russia was to take in the future of Slavdom. Thus we must seek in it the reverberations of another kind of nationalism: emerging Slavophilism. The term ‘‘Slavophilism’’ in its widest meaning encompasses a variety of concepts centered on ‘‘the love of Slavdom.’’ In Poland, it first appeared in the early nineteenth century, as a response to the partitions. It was most prominent in the writings of Stanis™aw Staszic, who believed that Russia would unite the Slavs while respecting their individual political and cultural traditions. In such a Pan-Slavic world, the Poles, through their cultural ‘‘seniority,’’ would play a role similar to that of the Greeks in the Roman Empire.14 In the ensuing years Slavophile tendencies played a role in a great number of Polish aesthetic and political ideologies, from Kazimierz Brodzinski’s ´ pre-Romantic literature through Adam Czartoryski’s political strategies to Adam Mickiewicz’s messianic historiosophy.15 Similarly, in Russia, an array of philosophies stressed ‘‘the Slavic idea,’’ but the term ‘‘Slavophile,’’ as defined in the late 1830s, came to denote a very specific set of principles.16 It centered on the veneration of pre-Petrine Russia, where, according to the Slavophiles, the common people and the ruling class 77

Halina Goldberg were united by selflessness and natural moral law. This harmony and the superior morality were allegedly generated by Orthodox Christianity, which, unlike its Western counterparts, was uncorrupted, free from the demoralizing influence of Latinization and Romanization. The nationalism of Nicholas I’s regime represented concepts different, and on some levels even adversarial, to the Slavophile philosophy. However, one cannot ignore the links between Official Nationality and protoSlavophiles. The most important influence was exerted via the Society of Wisdom Lovers, a circle of young intellectuals active in Moscow during the 1820s. A number of future Slavophiles, most notably Ivan Kireevskii, came from among the ranks of this society, and several more members are viewed today as precursors of the Slavophile philosophy, including one of the most outspoken propagators of Official Nationality, Mikhail Pogodin.17 Similarly the Wisdom Lovers admired the romantic poetry of Kireevskii’s grand-uncle and mentor, Vasilii Zhukovskii. The same Zhukovskii was the tutor to the tsarevich, and, as mentioned earlier, he inspired and collaborated on Glinka’s opera. Even more important is the connection between Glinka and Odoevskii, the society’s president. Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii, one of the most multitalented figures of the nineteenth-century Russian cultural scene, was one of Glinka’s most loyal supporters.18 He participated in A Life for the Tsar from the very beginning (perhaps as early as 1834, before it was conceived in operatic terms), and it was he who persuaded the composer to expand it into an opera.19 Odoevskii, who saw Glinka’s music as the highest artistic and patriotic achievement, wrote in his memoir: New directions in art aside, A Life for the Tsar also had a political meaning. It would counteract the painful memory, which was still alive in people’s minds, of the mischief of the Arakcheevs and Magnitskiis, who had done so much harm to people’s most sacred beliefs because of their arbitrariness and contempt for the law.20

In mentioning Arakcheev and Magnitskii, Odoevskii was referring to the humiliating period of censorship and fanatic anti-intellectualism that took place during the end of Alexander I’s reign.21 In other words, the Russian people were to regain their dignity through the affirmation of Russianness in Glinka’s opera. Motivated by the same search for Russian cultural dignity, Odoevskii wrote: One race in the European world possesses distinctive, characteristic, national melody based on a complete scale—among the Slav race this characteristic melody has been preserved in the depths of the Slav spirit from time immemorial.22

Slavophile philosophy resonates perhaps clearest in his Russian Nights, where he says of Glinka:

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Appropriating Poland You will be surprised to learn that not all the roads of melody have been trodden and that an artist begotten of the Slavic spirit is the only one of his triumvirate who has preserved the sacred things of the corrupt, humiliated, and defamed art of the West and found a fresh, uncharted path.23

He spells out the qualities that characterize this musical decadence as residing in the bravura and tinsel of contemporary concert music and in the empty brilliance of Rossini’s and Bellini’s operas. It was for a Russian composer to recover the spirit of Bach and Mozart.24 Odoevskii’s Russian Nights, although published in 1844, was first conceived in the 1820s during his years as the president of the Society of Wisdom Lovers, and it is clear that the new Slavophile mission for Russian music was defined by Odoevskii and others already during that period, well before Glinka’s opera was written. For instance, in 1826 a Moscow Observer article read: Music, like other arts, has rather exhausted those ideas around which it has so far moved this century. Something new and fresh was needed to rejuvenate these ideas, yet Europe has long since sought for it within itself without any success. Only in Russia is such a rich future to be found. Our fresh and youthful Russia, by its embodiment of national character, must renew the senescent artistic life of its mentor and introduce new elements.25

Such was the voice of Glinka’s contemporaries, and indeed, within his presentation of the well-known story of Ivan Susanin, one can observe his response to many Slavophile ideas. Glinka was not the first to take interest in the story of Susanin. It was used on other occasions by the official propaganda: most notably in the widely studied Russian history textbook written by the intensely xenophobic Sergei Glinka, the composer’s cousin.26 But it was specifically Glinka’s setting that had such a profound impact on Russian audiences. Much of the opera’s plot, with the exception of the epilogue, is in close accord with the Slavophile veneration of the native and primarily Slavic culture of pre-Petrine Russia.27 The centrality of Susanin’s character, a simple peasant elevated to the tragic and heroic, was unprecedented. In the person of this peasant was embodied the community-driven selflessness, which stood in sharp contrast to the decadent Western cult of the selfish individual. Susanin’s decision to protect the young tsar was motivated not by some external, imposed law, nor was he motivated by any political convictions, but rather he acted out of inner compulsion, motivated by the greater good of his people, his actions cutting through the artificial lateral divisions and bringing together peasants and their lords in a common cause. Glinka’s music served to affirm these values, and to that end the Russian characters spoke in what the audiences believed to be peasant musical idiom. The Poles, or rather the Polish gentry, on the other hand, were defined as self-centered and malevolent—a characterization completely consistent with what soon became the standard Slavophile view of the Polish role in the history of Slavdom.

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Halina Goldberg In Kireevskii’s opinion, one of most outstanding features of ancient Poland was the complete rift between the educated and Westernized upper classes and its common people.28 Ultimately Poland came to be viewed by the Slavophiles as the antithesis of Russia, the ‘‘Judas of Slavdom,’’ who betrayed other Slavs to the West. Poland’s weakness, they believed, was primarily in its adherence to Catholicism and the allegiance that the Polish Latinized gentry held toward the West. Analogous fervent views were expressed by one of the principal proponents of Slavophilism, Aleksei Khomiakov, in his enthusiastic review of Glinka’s Tsar, particularly in his comparison of the opera-generated images of Poles and Russians.29 The success in evoking national and anti-Polish sentiments was apparent already at the work’s premiere, when the zealous actors ventured beyond the original staging directions: In the fourth act, the chorus, playing the part of the Poles passing through the forest, at the end of the scene, fell upon Petrov (playing Susanin) with such fury that they ripped his shirt and he had to defend himself against them in all seriousness.30

In their eagerness to portray Polish brutality, the actors also changed Glinka’s original plan, according to which Susanin would be killed offstage and his death recounted in the epilogue. As a result of their zeal, in the first performance of the opera the audience was witness to Susanin’s heroic death at the hands of the vicious Poles.31 Naturally the opera served to rally Russians around a common cause; after the Moscow premiere of 1844 the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov wrote: ‘‘With Susanin the enemy also perished, for never has anyone encroached, nor will anyone ever encroach, upon Russia’s inner life without paying for it.’’32 Later on in the century, Tchaikovsky, whose comments about Glinka and his music forever vacillated between admiration and disdain, reported with distaste about a performance of Glinka’s Tsar that became a huge anti-Polish patriotic rally: As soon as the Poles appeared everybody started shouting ‘‘Down with the Poles!’’ and so on. In the scene where the Poles are supposed to kill Susanin, the actor who sang the part started fighting with the choristers—Poles—and as he was very strong he knocked several down; the rest seeing that the audience was delighted about this mockery of art, truth and decency, fell down too and the triumphant Susanin left, waving his arms, followed by a terrific applause from the Muscovites.33 The chorus became confused and stopped singing, and the audience called for the (national) anthem, which was played twenty times. At the end a portrait of the emperor was brought onto the stage and the terrific noise which then started cannot be described.34

This reaction to the music, such a public collective outburst, is a perfect example of what Anderson in his study of nationalisms calls ‘‘unisonality,’’ the 80

Appropriating Poland experience of communality through sound. ‘‘There is a special kind of contemporaneous community,’’ he writes, ‘‘which language alone suggests—above all in poetry and songs. Take national anthems, for example, sung on national holidays. No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in this singing an experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody. The image: unisonance.’’35 *** It would appear that Glinka’s opera forever joined the mazurka and the polonaise with the image of Poland as ‘‘the Fierce Enemy,’’ and that having once assigned this hermeneutic interpretation to Polish dances, the composer was compelled to maintain it throughout his oeuvre. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the Polish dances from the opera, disassociated from their textual connotations, immediately became everybody’s favorites. The mazurka, along with some other excerpts, was published within days of the opera’s premiere.36 The polonaise enjoyed the same measure of popularity, and Glinka seemed to be especially fond of it.37 In addition to their social functions, Polish dances held still other meanings: the polonaise in its ceremonial splendor also denoted the honor and pride of Russia, and the mazurka as a genre was repeatedly used by Glinka as a token of his affection for Poles and Polishness. Glinka himself was born into a landowning family of Polish ancestry, and throughout his life he maintained contacts with Polish writers and musicians. His links with Polish émigré circles in Russia were particularly intense during the summer of 1828, when he began to frequent salon gatherings of Maria Szymanowska, the celebrated Polish pianist and composer who recently arrived in St. Petersburg as the official pianist to the tsar’s court.38 There, the young Russian composer met Polish artists and intelligentsia who resided—by choice or otherwise—in the Russian capital, most notably Adam Mickiewicz, whose interaction with Russian Slavophiles merits a separate discussion.39 During the same period (1829), Glinka became acquainted with Prince Micha™ Kleofas Oginski, ´ the celebrated amateur composer famous for his polonaises;40 some years later (during the winter of 1834–35) he associated with Carlo Soliva, who, although Italian by birth, was for many years a voice professor at the Warsaw Conservatory and one of Chopin’s mentors.41 Through Viktor Kazhinskii, Glinka also made the acquaintance of Stanis™aw Moniuszko, the creator of Poland’s finest romantic operas, with whom he attended musical soirees at the home of the composer Vladimir Kastrioto-Skanderbek.42 In later years, Glinka actually lived in Warsaw for extended periods (1848–49 and 1850–51). Although his contacts during these visits were for the most part limited to Warsaw’s Russian circles and he spent much of his time in Poland in deep depression, he did make the acquaintance of some prominent Polish musicians. Most 81

Halina Goldberg notably he associated with August Freyer, whose extraordinary performances at the organ astonished Glinka,43 and Karol Kurpinski, ´ the longtime musical director of the National Theater and a renowned opera composer.44 Glinka’s contacts with Polish circles left a lasting impression on his musical style, and among his works are songs to poems by Adam Mickiewicz as well as a number of mazurkas. In the earlier years he edited a musical album, which featured a number of names associated with Szymanowska’s salon, among them Aleksandr Pushkin, Princes Sergei, and Lev Golitsyn, as well as several compositions by Glinka himself, including one of his many mazurkas. Of the works in this collection, Glinka especially cherished Szymanowska’s song ‘‘Vilia’’ to Mickiewicz’s just completed ‘‘Wallenrod,’’ of which he remarked: ‘‘[it] enchanted me in particular.’’45 Glinka’s encounters with Mickiewicz continued until the Polish poet’s departure from Russia, and still some years later, in 1843, he composed a mazurka on Mickiewicz’s words ‘‘To Her’’ (‘‘K nei’’). Toward the end of his life, while residing in Warsaw, Glinka reached for Mickiewicz’s text once again—this time in the romance ‘‘A Dialogue’’ (‘‘Rozmowa’’).46 Although Glinka never met Chopin, he admired the Polish master, often played his music,47 and composed mazurkas ‘‘in Chopin’s style.’’ The most famous of these mazurkas is the Souvenir d’une mazurque (Vospominanie o mazurke) (1847), which ultimately became part of a set entitled by the publisher ‘‘A Greeting to My Native Land’’ (Privet otchizne), thus—through fate’s infinite irony—appropriating Poland again. For Glinka, however, it was a very private piece, composed in a moment of personal crisis (to which the composer was prone) as suggested by the inclusion of the Metastasian phrase ‘‘Sans illusions, adieu la vie!’’ The mazurka was clearly an intimate gesture of gratitude toward Chopin (then still alive), and, according to Serov, Glinka originally wanted to inscribe it Hommage à Chopin but changed his initial intention because of the too frequent abuse of such ‘‘homages.’’48 Another ‘‘little mazurka in the manner of Chopin’’ was composed some years later, in May 1852, en route from St. Petersburg to Warsaw.49 In this desire to honor the Polish composer, Glinka pioneered a reception pattern that became typical of nineteenth-century Russia, as Russian composers and critics, Balakirev in particular, recognized Chopin to be the modernist precursor of the ‘‘Russian school,’’ a composer whose musical language was fundamental to the creation of a Slavic musical style.50 Serov looking back, in 1856, acknowledged the debt to Chopin in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar: ‘‘The Russian peasant element had to be balanced by another element, but what should it be? Polish, and consequently again Slavic, which directly evoked Chopin’s forms.’’51 In fact, it was no secret that Glinka saw himself as an heir to the great Pole. For instance, commenting on one of his own pieces, Glinka said, ‘‘Such modulations are also common in Chopin. It is our native inclination.’’52

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Appropriating Poland While mazurkas were almost invariably composed by Glinka to celebrate personal Polish connections, the two large-scale polonaises that Glinka composed after the success of his first opera stem from a very different tradition. ‘‘Great Is Our God, Great and Glorious Our Sovereign People’’ (Velik nash Bog, velik i slaven pervoderzhavnyi nash narod) was composed in 1837, at the request of the governor of Smolensk, to celebrate the imperial heir’s visit to that city.53 ‘‘The Solemn Polonaise,’’ on the other hand, one of Glinka’s last compositions, completed in April 1855, was written at the composer’s own initiative for the coronation of Alexander II.54 Both works are conceived in a grand, ceremonial manner, and to Glinka’s contemporaries they represented the embodiment of patriotism and the most noble Russian traditions. As one reviewer remarked of the latter work, ‘‘It breathes open, vital joy and sort of knightly spirit.’’55 How did the polonaise, the dance that embodied the heroic and epic Poland, come to signify this elated state of Russian pride? While some sort of a generic ‘‘polonaise,’’ a dance type, has been present in the Western culture since the early Baroque, ‘‘polonaise’’ in the modern sense was defined by the pre-Chopin generation, most notably Prince Micha™ Kleofas Oginski. ´ In Poland the polonaise came to signify the supreme expression of Polishness, particularly through the more emotionally charged polonaise triste genre established by Oginski; ´ through the historically and patriotically rooted operatic polonaises of Elsner and Kurpinski; ´ and ultimately through the epic, narrative mature works of Chopin. Glinka’s polonaises did not escape comparisons with those of Oginski, ´ who, as mentioned earlier, was his acquaintance. An article of 1854, while questioning the high appraisal of the Polish scene from Tsar, contrasts the music of Glinka and the polonaises of Oginski. ´ 56 But rather than seeking the ancestry for Glinka’s ceremonial polonaises in the works of Oginski, ´ it should be sought in the works of yet another Pole residing in Russia some decades earlier, Józef Koz™owski. Koz™owski, who was an officer in the Russian army during the Russo-Turkish wars, had a particular gift for composing polonaises. His triumphal polonaise, written to the Russian text ‘‘Thunder of Victory, Resound!’’ was to celebrate the end of the war in 1791, but after the partitions it came to symbolize Russia’s victory over Poland, and ultimately it became the model for triumphal polonaises denoting patriotism and Russian glory. It even served as the Russian anthem at state functions before ‘‘God Save the Tsar’’ (Bozhe, tsaria khrani) was adopted in 1833.57 In a similar vein a polonaise was used by Glinka’s older contemporary, Aleksei Vestorovskii, in his 1835 opera Askold’s Grave to introduce in a grand, ceremonial manner the scene at a Kievan (Russian) palace.58 Given this history of the polonaise in Russia, one can better place the furious outbursts of the opera spectators during performances of A Life for the Tsar: to them polonaise was a dance that captured Russian splendor, that rightfully belonged to Russia, and right before their eyes it was being reappropriated by the vengeful, plotting Polish gentry.

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Halina Goldberg The nineteenth-century making of nations pivoted around the Herderian notion that a community is constructed on common Bildung and shared language. In this respect Russian nationalism, official or otherwise, was essentially a Western concept, born of the same impulses as nationalism in Poland and Germany or, for that matter, in Hungary and Greece. The central role played by the vernacularization of the language naturally had to be echoed by the function given to music: the hosts of lexicographers, philologists, and grammarians inevitably had to be joined by composers. To quote Anderson on the role of music in the making of a nation: singing is a ‘‘physical realization of imagined community,’’ when ‘‘nothing connects us all but imagined sound.’’59 Music with its open semiotic contents was a perfect tool for the creation of national identity, since the interpretation of the musical text so completely depended on what the listener chose or was conditioned to hear.60 To recapitulate, in the opera the Polish dances helped to articulate the two different nations and musically described the hated enemy. For Tsar, the nationalist essence of the opera concentrated on the person of the young Romanov; hence Glinka insisted on calling the opera A Life for the Tsar. But for the Slavophiles, and apparently for Glinka, too, most important was the centrality of Susanin and his peasant Russianness, articulated musically against the arrogance and depravity of the Polish gentry—after all, it was the composer’s original wish to entitle his work Ivan Susanin. Outside the opera, the very same Polish music became benign; stripped of its textual meaning, it was used as a functional dance. Thus the polonaise served diverse purposes. In the opera it defined the Polish hatred for Russia; in the ballroom it was viewed as a generic dance; and in its ceremonial incarnation it portrayed the ‘‘great and glorious sovereign people of Russia.’’ The mazurka had similar divergent functions in the opera and the ballroom. In addition, for Glinka personally, the mazurka took on yet another, intimate connotation, when it was used to address his Polish friends. How could Polish dances convey so many different meanings to Russians? That faculty resides in ‘‘music’s transgressive element,’’ the quality that enables meaning to attach itself to music.61 This is what made these diverse and often conflicting readings possible and plausible. This is what makes music an invaluable tool of indoctrination and a precious commodity to those in power. The appropriation of Polish dances into Russian music followed a path similar to that of Polish Slavophile philosophy. Conceived as a means of rescuing Polish identity and dignity in the face of historical catastrophe, they became a vehicle for Russian cultural and political self-determination, and in the process came to define Russia’s Poland as essentially evil and alien. Yet they continued to serve as a thread of connection and communication between the two cultures, following the peculiar pattern of attraction and repulsion so often found in the history of these two nations.

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NOTES 1. A recent major study of Russian national identity in music by Richard Taruskin is entitled Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 2. In this article (Literaturnaia Gazeta, no. 4 [9 January 1841]), Fedor Koni, while praising Glinka’s achievement on the whole, criticized his ‘‘incorrect view of musical nationalism.’’ See Alexandra Orlova, Glinka’s Life in Music: A Chronicle, trans. Richard Hoops (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 276. 3. Comment by Count Mikhail Vielgorskii, March 1836, in Orlova, Chronicle, 123. 4. Comment by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Melgunov, in an article praising Glinka, written in May 1836, some months before the opera premiered and not published during the composer’s lifetime; in Orlova, Chronicle, 126. 5. Notes by Senator K. N. Lebedev; Orlova, Chronicle, 138. 6. V. F. Odoevskii, Severnaia pchela, no. 280 (December 7, 1836); Orlova, Chronicle, 143. 7. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Lvov and Ivan Prach (a Bohemian from Silesia, also known as Jan Bogumir Práˇc, or Johann Gottfried Pratsch) first published their collection of folk songs in 1790. Recent studies have convincingly established the influence that this ‘‘urban folklore’’ had on Glinka (Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 3–24; Margarita Mazo, introduction to the sixth edition [facsimile of the 1806 publication] of Lvov’s ‘‘Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes,’’ ed. Malcolm H. Brown [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987]). 8. Halina Goldberg, ‘‘Musical Life in Chopin’s Warsaw, 1810–1830’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1997); idem, Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 9. See for instance Richard Taruskin, ‘‘Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich,’’ Grove Dictionary of Opera, http://www.groveopera.com/operaonline/text/articles.html, May 1, 2000; idem, ‘‘Christian Themes in Russian Opera: A Millennial Essay,’’ Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 81–91, 88–89 in particular; idem, Defining Russia Musically, 25–47; and Jennifer Baker, ‘‘Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and ‘Official Nationality,’ ’’ Renaissance and Modern Studies 24 (1980): 92–114. 10. Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky, History of Russia, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 324. For a comprehensive discussion of Official Nationality in Russia, see idem, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). Incidentally Official Nationality was not a uniquely Russian phenomenon. Its connections with imperialism and manifestations in the British Empire and Japan, among others, are discussed by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 83–111. 11. David Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801–1881 (London: Longman, 1993), 118. 12. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 106. 13. Ibid., 107–108.

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Halina Goldberg 14. Stanis™aw Staszic ‘‘Uwagi do rodu ludzkiego,’’ in Andrzej Walicki, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, trans. Emma Harris (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 59. 15. Andrzej Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 2. 16. The first comprehensive outline is contained in Kireevskii’s ‘‘Reply to Khomyakov’’ of 1839 (ibid., 108). 17. Mikhail Pogodin, professor of history at Moscow University, first defined the historic principles of Russia by its own criteria in sharp opposition to the way history unfolded in the West. In contrast to the Slavophiles, Pogodin approved of Petrine reforms and wholeheartedly supported autocratic rule of the tsar. He also dismissed the Russian peasant as essentially passive and primitive. See Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 47–63. 18. Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii (1804–1869) was a romantic writer, philosopher, educationalist, philanthropist, and scientist. He was a musician who composed a piano quintet at age fifteen, a host of the most important musical and literary soirees of St. Petersburg and later Moscow, and a musicologist who wrote of his Western idols Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and his favorite contemporaries Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Wagner. He was also the first person to decipher the Orthodox chant notation. Nicknamed variously the ‘‘Russian Hoffman,’’ the ‘‘Russian Goethe,’’ and the ‘‘Russian Faust,’’ he was the leading intellectual and artistic presence in Glinka’s Russia. For an in-depth study of his contribution to the Russian musical culture, see Stewart Campbell, V.F. Odoyevky and the Formation of Russian Musical Taste in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1989). 19. David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 92–93. 20. November 1836, V. F. Odoevskii, Vospominaniia, 104, in Orlova, Chronicle, 134. 21. Aleksei Arakcheev, Alexander I’s war minister and his right-hand man, is mostly remembered for the inhumane, brutal, and despotic implementation of the ‘‘military settlements’’—a project combining military service with farming in order to maintain an active army while reducing costs and preventing social problems that arise from demobilization. Mikhail Magnitskii, a careerist dedicated to instituting biblical fanaticism, was active in the Ministry of Education under Alexander I, and was responsible for faculty and library purges at several universities, most notably Kazan and St. Petersburg (Riasanovsky, History of Russia, 318–19). 22. V. F. Odoevsky, Fatherland Notes, vol. 26, sec. 8, 1843, 94–100 (Stuart Campbell, ed. and trans., Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880: An Anthology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 34). 23. In a footnote Odoevskii identifies the three composers as MendelssohnBartholdy, Berlioz, and Glinka (Vladimir F. Odoevsky, Russian Nights, trans. Olga Koshansky-Olienikov and Ralph E. Matlaw [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965], 254). Translation from Orlova, Chronicle, 405. 24. Odoevsky, Russian Nights, 240–41.

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Appropriating Poland 25. Ya. M. Neverov in Moscow Observer, December 10, 1826, book 1, 374–84 (Campbell, Russians on Russian Music, 8). 26. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 28. 27. The much discussed epilogue, centering on the religious celebration of the tsar as the state, is the embodiment of pravoslavie as defined by Official Nationality. See Taruskin, ‘‘Christian Themes,’’ 89. 28. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy, 145. 29. Ibid., 221. 30. Glinka, Memoirs, 108. The audience was very quiet during the Polish second act, and Glinka was assured backstage that it is because the Poles were onstage (Glinka, Memoirs, 107). 31. Glinka had to explain to the tsar, who after the performance commented that ‘‘it was not good that [in the last scene] Susanin should be killed [by the Poles] onstage,’’ which was not his intention, and that because of sickness he was absent from the last rehearsal (Glinka, Memoirs, 108). 32. Review by Aleksei Khomiakov, Moskvitanin, part 3, no. 5, May 18, 1844; Orlova, Chronicle, 411. 33. Piotr Tchaikovsky to Aleksandra and Lev Davydov (Moscow), April 8, 1866 (Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Letters to His Family: An Autobiography, trans Galina von Meck [New York: Stein and Day, 1981], 30). On April 4, 1866, Karakozov, who was rumored to be a Pole, attempted to assassinate the tsar. Immediately following this incident, the performance of Glinka’s opera, which Tchaikovsky attended on April 5, gave rise to a massive anti-Polish demonstration. Incidentally the extensively altered libretto by Sergei Grodetskii, which was first introduced in 1939 and used for much of this century by the Soviets, is even more fiercely anti-Polish. For instance, the scene in the Polish encampment, which in Rozen’s original centers on celebrations of valiant and knightly victory over the Muscovites, in Grodetskii’s version seeks to depict Poles (including Polish ladies) as greedy, plundering, booty-hungry barbarians. The Soviet adaptation of the libretto and the role it played in service of communist propaganda merits a separate discussion. For a good general study, see Albrecht Gaub, ‘‘Mikhail Glinka as Preached and Practiced in the Soviet Union before and after 1937,’’ Journal of Musicological Research 22, no. 1 (January–June 2003): 101–34. 34. Piotr Tchaikovsky to Anatoli and Modest Tchaikovsky (Moscow), April 7, 1866 (Tchaikovsky, Letters to His Family, 29). 35. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145. 36. Severnaia pchela, no. 272, November 27, 1836; Orlova, Chronicle, 135. 37. After meeting Glinka for the first time, at the beginning of 1839, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov—a composer and renowned music critic—noted that the typically sulky Glinka became more cordial and talkative after taking part in a dance to his polonaise from A Life for the Tsar (Serov, Vospominaniia, 69), in Orlova, Chronicle, 221. 38. Glinka, Memoirs, 47–48. The translator misreads Maria Szymanowska’s last name as Shimanovskii and consistently refers to her in the masculine. 39. Mickiewicz’s views had a profound impact on the Russian Slavophiles, especially Aleksandr Herzen whose philosophical relationship with Poland is itself a case study in the attraction/repulsion pattern typical of cultural and political interactions between Poland and Russia. Herzen’s response to Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, found in

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Halina Goldberg his essay ‘‘What Now?’’ reveals this fascination with the stereotypes of ‘‘panskaya Polsha’’ (Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration, 68). 40. Glinka, Memoirs, 49. 41. Ibid., 95. 42. P. Stepanov, Vospominaniia, 64, in Orlova, Chronicle, 515–16. 43. Glinka, Memoirs, 219. 44. Ibid., 221. 45. Ibid., 49. 46. This mazurka was a setting of Mickiewicz’s Polish text. The pronunciation was taught to Glinka by one of his ‘‘Polish ladies,’’ to whom he dedicated the song (Glinka, Memoirs, 221). 47. For instance, at a gathering in the Warsaw house of Novosel’skii in December 1849 (Kovalevskii, Vospominaniia, 253), in Orlova, Chronicle, 532). 48. Serov, Vospominaniia, 97, in Orlova, Chronicle, 517. 49. Orlova, Chronicle, 587. 50. Jim Samson briefly discusses this topic in ‘‘Chopin Reception: Theory, History, Analysis,’’ in Chopin Studies 2, ed. Jim Samson and John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 8–9. The same collection contains an article devoted to Chopin reception in late-nineteenth-century Russia by Anne Swartz. Swartz successfully presents the immense scale of the impact that Chopin’s music had in Russia, but she opts not to address the complex and contradictory aspects of philosophies shaping the creation of musical national identity in Russia (Anne Swartz, ‘‘Chopin as Modernist in Nineteenth-Century Russia,’’ in Chopin Studies 2, 35–49). 51. A. N. Serov, Muzykal’nyi i teatral’nyi vestnik, no. 26 (July 1, 1856), in Orlova, Chronicle, 720. 52. In ‘‘Gretchen’s Song’’ from Goethe’s Faust (Serov, Vospominaniia, 97, in Orlova, Chronicle, 518). 53. Glinka, letter to his mother, April 13, 1837, in Orlova, Chronicle, 165. 54. Glinka, letter to V. Engel’gardt, April 7, 1855, in Orlova, Chronicle, 662. 55. Serov in Muzykal’nyi i teatral’nyi vestnik, no. 35 (September 2, 1856), in Orlova, Chronicle, 729. 56. Bulgurin in Severnaia pchela, no. 275 (December 6, 1854), in Orlova, Chronicle, 649. 57. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 282–84. 58. Ibid., 282. 59. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145. 60. Consider this: the ‘‘Solemn Polonaise’’ of 1855 included a Spanish bolero as a trio, which caused Glinka ‘‘tender-hearted tears of emotion, since it was made in a very Russian way’’ (Glinka, letter to V. Engel’gardt, April 7, 1855, in Orlova, Chronicle, 662). According to David Brown, the trio was included because Glinka ‘‘could not offer a Polish gesture to a White Russian Tsar’’ (David Brown, Mikhail Glinka, 291). 61. The phrase was coined by Edward Said in Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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five

The Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question in ∞∫∏≥ Andrzej Walicki

The Polish uprising of 1863 was a watershed in the history of partitioned Poland and an important event in the history of the Russian Empire. It was the last attempt to restore—in a new, democratized form—the old PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, understood as a multiethnic community based upon common historical tradition. Its consequences, however, were strikingly different, powerfully contributing to the rise of narrowly ethnic nationalism in the region. One consequence was, of course, the awakening of militant nationalism among ethnic Russians. A second was the emergence of ethnonationalism among Lithuanian peasants, who, in 1863, were still loyal to the patriotic tradition of the commonwealth and bravely fought in the ranks of the Polish insurgents. Finally, the disastrous effects of the defeat gave Polish patriots powerful arguments for giving up the romantic ideal of Poland’s historical mission, and for defining the Polish nation as an ethnic community, having different aims and interests than other ethnic communities of old, historical Poland. The most influential ideologist of the anti-Polish nationalism, unleashed by the uprising, was Mikhail Katkov, editor of the Moscow News. Like the 89

Andrzej Walicki Slavophiles, he tried to present Polish patriots as spokesmen of reactionary Catholic nobility, whose deceptive slogans about liberty were merely a mask of particularistic, feudal interests. However—unlike his Slavophile allies, as well as his main adversary, Alexander Herzen—he ignored the issue of the deeper, civilizational causes of the Polono-Russian conflict.1 The main theorists of this problem, interpreting ‘‘the Polish question’’ in historiosophical terms as a salient part of the long contest between Western and Russian principles, were two thinkers from the broadly conceived Slavophile camp. One of them was Nikolai Strakhov, representing the neo-Slavophile movement of the ‘‘return to the soil’’ (pochvennichestvo); the other, representing mainstream Slavophile thought, was Iurii Samarin, a friend and disciple of Aleksei Khomiakov. Strakhov reacted to the January uprising by writing a provocative article, ‘‘The Fatal Question,’’ published in April 1863 in Dostoevsky’s journal Time (Vremia).2 The reception of this article in conservative circles was similar in many respects to the scandal brought about, in 1836, by the publication of Petr Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letter.3 Both authors provoked an indignant reaction by claiming that Russian culture was inferior to Western cultures, shaped by the Catholic Church. In both cases an intervention from above took place, and the respective periodicals, guilty of ‘‘offending the fatherland,’’ were closed. And, I may add, in both cases Russian national pride was wounded by writers who saw themselves as deeply committed to conservative values. According to Strakhov, the main reason for the uprising was the Polish feeling of cultural superiority over Russians; the moral impossibility of accepting a situation in which a cultural, European nation finds itself under the rule of uneducated barbarians. The author stressed that this was not merely an arrogant illusion, that the Polish superiority was not imaginary but quite real. He quoted in this context Kireevskii’s opinion that in the sixteenth century the Polish nobility was the most brilliant and most highly educated aristocracy in Europe.4 And he formulated his own standpoint in an unequivocal manner: Poland from the very beginning progressed together with the rest of Europe. She adopted Catholicism with the Western nations and developed spiritually together with them. In science, literature, and other manifestations of civilization she constantly fraternized and competed with the other members of the European family. She has never been a retarded member of this family, let alone an alien. [. . .] Thus, the Poles can see themselves as a fully European nation; they can claim to be a part of the ‘‘land of sacred miracles,’’ the great West, which represents the highest achievements of humanity and the main stream of universal history. (95)

And what about the Russians? The ideologist of pochvenniki answered this question in the spirit of Chaadaev: Let us not deceive ourselves, let us try to understand how we are perceived by the Poles, and Europeans in general. [. . .] Our history was separated from the history of Europe. [. . .] Our contemporary civilization, our sci-

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Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question ence, our literature, are almost without history, recent and pale, as products of belated and strained imitation. (93–94)

The only genuine achievement of Russian history was, from this perspective, the creation of a powerful, independent state. But, Strakhov argued, powerful states could be created by savages. Political power does not have to be coupled with civilization. The best proof of this is Poland: a highly civilized nation without its own statehood. Strakhov’s attempt to achieve an empathetic understanding of the Polish standpoint included also an explanation of the stubborn Polish striving for the restoration of Poland in its old, historical boundaries. The high level of the Polish civilization, he boldly argued, endowed the Poles with the moral right to leadership among the Slavs and to the eastern expansion. Latinization and Polonization of the eastern Slavs served the noble cause of spreading European civilization—not only in the Belorussian and Ukrainian lands but even in the Muscovite tsardom (96–97). Polish rule in Ukraine was legitimate because—who were the ‘‘Little Russians’’ in comparison with the Poles? Their language was merely a crude dialect, devoid of developed literature; their religion—in Catholic eyes—was merely a provincial schism. It was necessary to civilize these people, and only the Poles could accomplish this task. Common religion and common language are not enough to delineate the boundaries of states. Russia could claim the Belorussian and Ukrainian lands only in the case of representing, in relation to them, the right of superior civilization and an important historical mission (103). Otherwise not, irrespective of the degree of ethnic proximity. At this juncture, however, Strakhov began to draw a line dividing his own views from the Polish perspective on Russia. He professed his belief in the enormous potential of Russia and in the great future of the Russian people. The very fact that the Russians had not yielded to Polonization was for him a proof that Russia had a future as an original, highly developed civilization. As a pochvennik, he saw the embryos of this civilization in the traditional forms of life of the Russian folk. And he concluded from this that Russian civilization had a chance to develop organically, from below, a chance that, eventually, would make it stronger and superior to the aristocratic civilization of the Poles (100–102). As we can see, this was a complex diagnosis, deliberately excluding ‘‘simple’’ judgments on the Polish question. On the one hand, Strakhov reconstructed and explained the traditional views of Polish patriots; he did it with impressive objectivity and even sympathy, stressing that in all matters concerning the past the Poles were essentially right. On the other hand, he provided strong arguments against the optimistic belief in the possibility of solving the Polish question through the mild treatment of the Poles and through offering them material concessions. His analysis showed the fundamental, civilizational character of the Polono-Russian conflict. Fedor Dostoevsky concluded

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Andrzej Walicki from this that the Polish uprising was, in fact, the beginning of the imminent war between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Russia and Europe.5 To be precise, we should add that Strakhov himself did not emphasize specifically religious aspects of the conflict of civilizations. This was done by Samarin, a faithful follower of Khomiakov’s Orthodox fundamentalism. Samarin’s article ‘‘The Present Day Scope of the Polish Question,’’ published in September 1863 in the Slavophile newspaper Day, was the most comprehensive treatment of the Polish problem from the Slavophile standpoint.6 It sharply distinguished three aspects of the Polish question: (1) Polish nationality as an ethno-cultural unit, having an undisputed right to exist as a part of Slavdom; (2) the Polish state, ineradicably expansionist toward its eastern neighbors; and (3) ‘‘polonism,’’ that is, the culture of the Catholic Polish gentry which had transformed Poland into ‘‘a sharp wedge driven by Latinism into the very heart of the Slavic world.’’7 Following Khomiakov, Samarin presented Latin civilization as deeply hostile to everything Slavic. Unlike the Czechs, who resisted Latinism under the banner of Hussitism, the Polish nobles embraced Catholicism wholeheartedly, fully identifying themselves with the role of the military vanguard of Latinism in the East of Europe. In their inevitable confrontation with Russia they represented not only the Catholic world but the West as a whole; it was so because Protestant Europe (as Khomiakov had proved) was merely a subdivision of Latin civilization.8 (Hussitism, interpreted as a semiconscious return to Orthodoxy, was seen as a completely different case.) In the light of this diagnosis, the state created by ‘‘polonism,’’ defining itself as ‘‘antemurale Christianitatis,’’ had to be a vassal of the West, incurably hostile to Russia. This was the main reason for the partitioning of Poland. And the true meaning of the uprising of 1863 was nothing less than an attempt of the Polish ‘‘pany’’ (lords) to resume their old civilizational mission. However, Samarin did not want to see Poland completely lost for Slavdom. He claimed that Poland had two souls: the dominant ‘‘Latin’’ soul and the semi-suppressed ‘‘Slavic’’ soul. He attributed the latter to the Polish peasantry but saw it also in the anti-Western tendencies of Polish romantic thought such as Lelewel’s idealization of the ancient Slavic communalism or Mickiewicz’s denunciations of the inherent ‘‘falsity’’ of European civilization.9 The existence of these tendencies were for him proof that the Slavic soul of Poland was awakening and preparing itself for a struggle against oppressive ‘‘Latinism.’’ This struggle would be decisive for the future of the nation: Poland would either perish or regenerate itself as a part of Slavdom. But deep in his heart the Slavophile thinker did not cherish too many illusions. He was aware that the Polish critics of ‘‘Latinism’’ were not ready to abandon the idea of the restoration of ‘‘historical Poland’’ and therefore could not renounce the legitimizing device of ‘‘Poland’s eastern mission.’’ He himself was very skeptical about the viability of a merely ‘‘ethnographic’’ Poland and did not believe in the possibility of a spontaneous ‘‘re-Slavization’’ of the Poles: 92

Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question he was quite explicit that bringing them back to the Slavic fold would not be possible without direct Russian intervention. As the first step in this direction he recommended that all schools in the ‘‘western gubernias’’ should be in the hands of the Russian clergy.10 After the crushing of the uprising, Samarin became the main adviser of Nikolai Miliutin, the state secretary with special powers in Congress Poland. In this capacity he promoted the policy of ‘‘social Caesarism,’’ trying to win over the Polish peasants, representing the ‘‘Slavic soul’’ of the country, and to turn them against the forces of ‘‘Latinism’’—rebellious nobility and Catholic clergy. Irrespective of its aims, this policy did, in fact, benefit the peasants: the emancipation reform, carried out by the Russian authorities, gave them land on better conditions than in Russia.11 But the results did not conform to Samarin’s expectations: the emancipated peasants of Congress Poland did not become grateful and loyal subjects of the Russian Empire. Another aspect of Samarin’s reaction to the Polish uprising was his violent and vulgar campaign against the Catholic clergy, especially against the Jesuits. At the beginning of 1864, the false rumor that the Russian government considered the possibility of allowing the Jesuits to return to Russia produced in the nationalist circles a hysterical reaction, in which hatred was mixed with grossly exaggerated fears of a Catholic conspiracy against Russia. Samarin powerfully contributed to it by publishing five letters to the Russian Jesuit, Father Martynov, about Jesuits and their relations to Russia. These letters, published the following year as a separate book, were a savage attack on the Catholic Church as a whole.12 Among other things, they accused the Catholic clergy of igniting the Polish rebellion, taking part in its most terrible crimes, and justifying these crimes in a special civic catechism. The text of this crudely Machiavellian document, known as ‘‘The Polish Catechism,’’ was published by Samarin as proof that the Catholic Church consciously allowed the use of all means, even the most evil, in pursuing its anti-Russian aims.13 However, as might have been expected, this alleged instruction for the Polish clergy was, in fact, a Russian forgery. As we can see, Samarin was a leading figure in the anti-Polish campaign of 1863–64. He fully deserves to be compared in this respect to Katkov. Nevertheless Alexander Herzen—the main Russian Polonophile, brutally attacked in Katkov’s press—agreed to meet Samarin in London and, after a long conversation, in July 1854, rejected the view that in the Polish question they were separated by an abyss. He found it possible to argue that despite political differences both of them served the same historical cause: the cause of promoting the communal values of the Russian people.14 It sounded paradoxical but (as I have tried to show elsewhere)15 was, in fact, firmly rooted in the Slavophile component of Herzen’s ‘‘Russian socialism.’’ Despite his moral support for the Polish cause, Herzen agreed with Samarin that historical Poland, Poland of the gentry, was a ‘‘military vanguard of Western civilization’’ and, because of this, was doomed to be defeated by the rising Slavic world, repre93

Andrzej Walicki sented by Russia. Like Samarin, he drew a contrast between ‘‘people’s Poland’’ and ‘‘old Poland,’’ stressing that the latter was hopelessly fettered by Catholicism, which killed her Slavic soul and tied her to the fate of the West. And, of course, both thinkers perceived Russia as a country of the future, free from the heritage of Western feudalism and bourgeois individualism. The existence of such convergences should not be seen as something curious, or exclusively Russian. Striking affinities between conservative and socialist communalism (or communitarianism) could often be observed in nineteenth-century Western thought. A good example of this is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of Herzen’s ideological mentors and, at the same time, a sympathizer of Samarin’s ‘‘Orthodox-Christian Socialism’’ (to use his own expression).16 Further development and practical application of the Slavophile ideas on the Polish question was offered by Ivan Aksakov, who in the next decades became the most prolific Slavophile commentator on the nationality problem in Russia. His articles show the crucial importance of the Polish question for the formation of modern Russian nationalism. He himself declared that he saw it as the central question of Russian politics, internal and external.17 For Aksakov, this was tantamount to saying that the main internal enemy of Russia was the Polish Catholic Church. In his view, if Poland were not Catholic, the Polish question would not have existed (388). On the eve of the insurrection, Aksakov advocated the policy of concessions in the Congress kingdom. He rejected the Prussian principle of ‘‘national egoism,’’ stressing that the Russians need moral legitimation in political action (4–6). He condemned, theoretically, all forms of national oppression— political, social, and economic, Russian, Polish, or Jewish. He concluded from this that Poles have a right to autonomy but only in the ethnically Polish areas: in Warsaw, Poznan, ´ and Kraków but not in Kiev or Smolensk (8). Aksakov was aware that the ethnic (‘‘ethnographical’’) conception of nationality was not the only one, that there also existed a ‘‘political’’ conception of the nation, invoking the traditions of statehood and historical rights. But he saw this second conception as anachronistic, serving only the interests of the ‘‘historical class,’’ the nobility. Hence he wrote with indignation about the Polish demands to unite the Congress kingdom with the lands of historical Lithuania (17–18). Such a demand showed, in his view, that Polish patriotism was based upon the antiquated principles of historical legitimism, hostile to the strivings for genuinely national autonomy and self-determination. For this reason Polish patriots did not sympathize with the aspirations of small, ethnic nationalities, such as the Czechs in the Habsburg Empire (18–19).18 For some time after the outbreak of the January uprising Aksakov wanted to solve problems through political concessions. He was against introducing military dictatorship in the Kingdom. He wanted instead to win over the Polish peasantry. He suggested the convening of an all-national Polish Sejm, modeled on the Land Assemblies in pre-Petrine Russia. He expected that the 94

Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question peasant majority in this Sejm would vote for a measure of national autonomy within the Russian Empire. In this way the rule in Poland would become morally legitimized, and the relation of submission would be transformed into a voluntary alliance of the two brotherly nations.19 The course of events, however, pushed the Slavophile thinker to more and more extreme positions. In May 1863 the appearance of a few Polish insurgents near Kiev threw him into panic. It appeared to him that the sacred capital of the old Rus’ would fall into the hands of the ‘‘accursed Latin heretics,’’ like Moscow during the Time of Troubles (94–95; article from May 25, 1863). He took seriously threats of Western intervention and warned that it might put an end to the very existence of Russia as a separate civilization, the spiritual center of the Orthodox Slavic world (96–97). Because of this, Aksakov’s views on the Polish question evolved in the direction of abandoning the hopes of solving it through concessions. He embraced instead a policy of active Russification, supported from below, by a wholesale mobilization of the entire Orthodox population of the empire. His new ideas can be summarized in four points. First, Aksakov abandoned the idea of an ‘‘ethnographical’’ Poland. Poles, he claimed, are not an ethnic nationality like the Czechs; the notion of ‘‘Polishness’’ is confessional (Roman Catholicism) and civilizational (Latin civilization); above all, it is a political credo, which demands an unbending acceptance of the Eastern mission of the old Commonwealth. As such, it depends mostly on religious affiliation: Catholic Ruthenians are simply Poles, whereas an ‘‘Orthodox Pole’’ is a contradiction in terms (464). The notion of an ‘‘ethnographical Poland’’ was wholly artificial, invented by the Russians, unacceptable to all sides and inherently unrealizable. All hopes, bound up with it, proved to be vain. After recent events the Congress kingdom became sheer political nonsense, demanding a quick and radical liquidation (452–53). In this manner the Slavophile ideologist justified the transformation of Congress Poland into a ‘‘Vistula land,’’ deprived of any remnants of autonomy. He postulated its direct Russification, which should begin by banning the Polish language from all official institutions. He also recommended the preferential treatment of non-Polish languages of the former Congress kingdom, through the creation of a network of schools teaching in Lithuanian, Ruthenian, or German (454). Of course, this was meant to prevent the consolidation of the ‘‘Vistula land’’ as an ethnically homogeneous Polish territory. Second, Aksakov abandoned Samarin’s view of Polish dual identity: he decided that Poland had only one, Latin soul, and that the ‘‘re-Slavization’’ of the Poles was a utopian dream. He combined this diagnosis with the perception of the Poles as culturally superior to the Russians, and therefore extremely strong and dangerous. This was the reason why the Orthodox nobles of ‘‘Western Russia’’ (i.e., historical Lithuania and Ukraine) had become Polonized, transforming themselves into the most ardent Polish patriots. Poles are proud 95

Andrzej Walicki of their great men, like Ko´sciuszko and Mickiewicz, but in fact these men were descendants of national renegades and should have returned to the religion and nationality of their Russian ancestors (41, 364). Despite the well-deserved downfall of the Polish state, the cultural superiority of ‘‘Polonism’’ continued to exist and even became stronger. The pro-Polish policy of Alexander I gave rise to a new, powerful wave of Polonization processes in ‘‘Western Russia.’’ Happily it was weakened by unreasonable Polish uprisings. Nevertheless, the Russians should not confine themselves to crushing the rebels by force; they should realize that Polish influence is most dangerous in peaceful times, that the constructive, educational work of Czartoryski’s and Czacki’s was much more detrimental to Russia than the Polish insurrectionary activities (364). The supremacy of Polishness in the ‘‘western gubernias’’ maintains itself despite severe restrictions of the civic rights of the Polish population. It is so because the Polish influence there represents a moral power, created in the process of social interaction, whereas the Russian influence represents only the force of bayonets (233, 417).20 Aksakov concluded from this that the Polish cultural domination in the lands of historical Lithuania could not be broken by Russian bureaucrats. To cope with this task successfully, it was necessary to create a highly qualified intelligentsia in western Russia. But this could not be done at once. For the time being, therefore, it was necessary to continue the suppression of Polish culture by force. Aksakov saw this as a sad necessity but a necessity nonetheless. He declared that he did not regret that the famous University of Wilno had been closed, that Polish books had ceased to appear in the province, that all forms of the lively activity of the Polish intelligentsia in Lithuania had been suppressed with nothing to replace them.21 In his view, this was necessary for Russia’s survival. The third component in Aksakov’s views on the Polish question was the call for an anti-Polish national mobilization. He constantly repeated that the social power of the Polish nobility in the ‘‘western gubernias’’ could not be broken by administrative methods: Russian bureaucrats, badly educated and corrupted, would never be able to put an end to the cultural and material supremacy of the Poles. To resist the Polish danger effectively, Russia must carry out deep internal reforms and, above all, regenerate itself morally (241). This process of regeneration must proceed from below, taking the form of the national mobilization of the masses (448). The Russian population must become fully and consciously Russian. Traditional imperial patriotism was not enough: the moral power of Polonism must be faced with the moral power of the Russian national spirit (97–98). Paradoxically this was made possible by the Poles themselves: their rebellions were one of the main factors in shaping modern national consciousness among the Russians (657). It was especially true for the peasants of Belorussia. Despite the demoralizing influence of the local nobles and priests, the uprising of 1863 made the peasants clearly aware that the Polish cause was not 96

Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question their own. Owing to this, their country would undergo a process of ‘‘national awakening’’ on the Czech model (41–43). The results of this process would show that the Belorussian lands were ethnically Russian. Aksakov thought that natural leaders of this ‘‘west-Russian’’ movement for national revival would emerge from the ranks of the white (non-monastic) Orthodox clergy (42). At the same time he demanded for this ‘‘movement from below’’ a strong support from above, in the form of a consistently executed Russification policy (498). He explicitly stated that Russification should be ‘‘shameless,’’ disregarding legal formalities in the name of the highest interest of the Russian nation. He ridiculed the position of the editors of the aristocratic periodical Vest’ who demanded equal protection of the rights and interests of all nobles of the empire, irrespective of their nationality (482). Finally, the fourth constitutive element of the national program was Aksakov’s conviction that Russia could not afford civic equality of two religious groups: Catholics and Jews. He justified this position by arguing that Catholicism and Judaism implied a political credo that excluded sincere loyalty to an Orthodox state (426–27). A Russian Jew would always see himself as a member of the ‘‘chosen nation’’; a Russian Catholic would remain loyal to the Vatican and serve as a conscious or unconscious tool of ‘‘Polonism.’’ Aksakov concluded from this that the links between Catholicism and Polishness should be visible, not masked. Nobody should be deceived by the false idea that it was possible to convert to Catholicism and to remain Russian. Therefore the use of the Russian language should be prohibited in Catholic churches. The Catholic Church in the Russian Empire should be branded with the ‘‘shameful stigma of Polonism,’’ in order to be easily recognized as an open enemy of Russia (470–74).22 Aksakov formulated this standpoint in a series of articles in 1867.23 But in the next decade he changed his mind. He began to argue that Russia should strive for a ‘‘de-Polonization of Catholicism’’ (rozpolachenie katolicizma) and that the first step in this direction should consist in the introduction of the Russian language to the Catholic churches in the ‘‘western gubernias.’’ Otherwise Catholic believers of Russian background (i.e., the Belorussian Catholics) would be exposed to the influence of Polish and thus pushed in the direction of Polonization.24 This change of views was correlated with the government’s plan to russify the Catholic churches in Belorussia at the expense of ‘‘sanctioning’’ Catholicism as a Russian confession. This plan, elaborated in 1872, was vigorously resisted by the Russian Jesuits in France. Father Gagarin and Father Martynov devoted a series of publications to the plan, showing that implementation of the new policy would promote the careers of the weakest, most servile elements among the clergy and thus undermine the authority of the Church as such.25 Their views were discussed in the Vatican, and the cardinals unanimously decided to ask the Russian government to change its plans. As a result, the implementation of the intended policy was abandoned. This situation 97

Andrzej Walicki forced Aksakov to revise his former views, since now, ironically, they could be regarded as support for the Jesuits and the Apostolic See. It would be wrong, however, to see this situational context as the only reason for Aksakov’s change of mind. This change was also a result of the general evolution of his nationalism. In the sixties he stressed the inadequacy of the old, imperial patriotism, setting against it an ethno-religious variant of nationalism, stressing the centrality of religious affiliation. In the next decade he began to attach more importance to the ethno-linguistic factors. It seems obvious that this change of emphasis reflected his approval of the linguistic focus of the anti-Polish policies of the government: the introduction of Russian as the language of instruction in Congress Poland and the harsh restrictions of the use of Polish in the ‘‘western gubernias.’’ On the whole, Aksakov’s case is a good illustration of the general evolution of Slavophile thought. Slavophilism, born as a romantic, utopian vision of a truly Christian society, evolved in the direction of ethno-nationalism, postulating the transformation of the empire into the national state of ethnic Russians. As I have tried to show, the impossibility of solving the Polish question within the framework of a multiethnic monarchy was one of the main causes of this evolution. NOTES 1. Katkov did not believe in Russia’s Sonderweg. He was a conservative Westerner and saw the Russian Empire as a part of Europe. 2. ‘‘The Fatal question’’ is the title of a recently published history of the Polish question in Polish political thought (H. G™˛ebocki, Fatalna sprawa. Kwestia polska w rosyjskiej my´sli politycznej (1856–1866) [Kraków: Arcana, 2000]). Unfortunately this valuable book, based upon rich archival materials, does not pay adequate attention to Strakhov’s article. 3. See Andrzej Lazari, Poczwienniczestwo. Z badan´ nad historia˛ idei w Rosji (©ód´z, 1988), 66. 4. N. Strakhov, Bor’ba s Zapadom v nashei literature, 3rd ed. (Kiev, 1897), 2:92–93 (reprint, Slavic Printings and Reprints, ed. C. H. van Schooneveld [Mouton: The Hague-Paris, 1969]). 5. See The Unpublished Dostoevsky: Diaries and Notebooks (1860–81), ed. C. R. Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), 1:54. 6. Reprinted in Iurii Samarin, Sochineniia, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1877–1911), Vol. 1. A detailed analysis of this article is contained in A. N. Pypin, ‘‘Pol’skii vopros v russkoi literature,’’ Vestnik Evropy (1880) (published as a separate book in Polish: A. N. Pypin, Sprawa polska w literaturze rosyjskiej [Warsaw, 1881]). 7. Samarin, Sochineniia, 1:333. 8. Ibid., 1:336–38. 9. Ibid., 1:340–41. For Samarin’s view of Mickiewicz’s messianism, see my study, ‘‘Adam Mickiewicz’s Paris Lectures and Russian Slavophilism,’’ in A. Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 108–109.

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Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question 10. Samarin, Sochineniia, 1:347. 11. The peasants received larger allotments, the immediate remission of all labor dues and debts, and the right to customary easements. Most important, no redemption payments were imposed. See S. J. Zyzniewski, ‘‘Miljutin and the Polish Question,’’ in Russian Thought and Politics, Harvard Slavic Studies, 6 vols. (Mouton: The Hague, 1957), 4:237–48. For a classical analysis of the interconnection between the agrarian program of Miliutin-Samarin and the bloody suppression of the Polish uprising by general Mikhail Murav’ev—‘‘the hangman,’’ see J. Kucharzewski, Od bia™ego caratu do czerwonego, vol. 4, Wyzwalanie Iudów (Warsaw, 1931). 12. In Iurii Samarin, Iesuity i ikh otnoshenie k Rossii (Moscow: Tipografiia Gracheva, 1870). 13. ‘‘Polskii katikhizis,’’ in Samarin, Sochineniia, 4:321–26. 14. See A. I. Herzen, ‘‘Pis’ma k protivniku,’’ in idem, Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow: Pravda, 1975), 18:275. 15. For a comprehensive analysis of Herzen’s views on the Polish question, see my study ‘‘Alexander Herzen’s Russian Socialism as a Response to Polish Revolutionary Slavophilism,’’ in Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration, 1–72. 16. See G™˛ebocki, Fatalna sprawa, 349. 17. See I. S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 3, Pol’skii vopros i zapadnorusskoe delo (Moscow, 1886), 227. 18. Aksakov’s views on the essential difference between Polish and Czech national aspirations coincided, of course, with the typological distinction between ‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘non-historical’’ nations, officially accepted in the Habsburg Empire. Cf. A. Walicki, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 119–23. 19. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 3, Pol’skii vopros i zapadno-russkoe delo, 30–31 (article from February 2, 1863). 20. Fear that the Polish influence in Belorussia was steadily increasing and seeing Russification policy as a necessary measure of Russian self-defense was typical of the Russian perception of the situation in the ‘‘western gubernias’’ after the crushing of the January insurrection. See Theodore R. Weeks, ‘‘Defining Us and Them: Poles and Russians in the Western Provinces, 1863–1914,’’ Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (spring 1994): 26–41. 21. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 3, Pol’skii vopros i zapadno-russkoe delo, 503. 22. One reason for Aksakov’s opposition to the official sanctioning of ‘‘Russian Catholicism’’ was his obsessive fear that the Russian language in Catholic churches might pave the way for new attempts at the union with Rome. Mikhail Katkov took a different position in this question: in his view, the Russian government should win the loyalty of Catholic believers instead of assuming their inherent enmity toward Russia. See Kucharzewski, Od bia™ego caratu do czerwonego, 4:31–32. 23. Articles such as ‘‘Katolitsizm kak moguchee sredstvo opolacheniia’’ and ‘‘Zhelatelno-li vvedenie russkogo iazyka v latinskoe bogosluzhenie?’’ 24. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 3, Pol’skii vopros i zapadno-russkoe delo, 665–66. 25. Gagarin devoted a series of articles to this problem in Journal de Bruxelles (November 1872), and Martynov followed by writing a separate brochure, De la langue russe dans la culte catholique. See S.J. Adrien Boudon, Le Saint-Siège et la Russie, vol. 2 (Paris, 1925), 392–93. Cf. also B. Mucha, Rosjanie wobec katolicyzmu (©ód´z, 1989), 98–99.

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six

Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners from the House of the Dead Nina Perlina

Dostoevsky’s response to the outbreak of the Polish Revolt in 1863 is well known: he treated the insurgents’ demand for the independence of their country and a restoration of the Polish borders of 1772 as a challenge to the might of the Russian Empire and a threat to the moral integrity of all Russian people. Having read about the beginning of the revolt from newspapers, Dostoevsky began his private notebook of 1863 with the question: ‘‘What is the real war?— The Polish war is the war of two Christianities [Christian denominations— N.P.], this is the beginning of the future war of Russian Orthodox Christianity with Catholicism, in other words—of the Russian genius and European civilization. Here the progress is ours—and not an official progress (in agreement with the Dutch formula), but the peoples’ progress.’’1 After 1863 Dostoevsky’s tolerant, evenly balanced cultural attitude toward the West and Poland acquired an aggressive, nationalistic, militant stance; beginning from the midsixties his novels depicted Polish characters only as insignificant, background figures portrayed through lampoon images. Viewing Dostoevsky through the prism of ‘‘Polonophobia/Polonophilia,’’ one could rightfully assume that ‘‘the great Russian writer Dostoevsky did not like Poles,’’ if only his famous novel 100

Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners Notes from the House of the Dead did not provide a remarkable exception to this general assertion. But then it is important to keep in mind that Notes from the House of the Dead was written before the fatal date of 1863 and, more important, that as a narrative the work is presented to us as a text authored not by Dostoevsky but by another person—Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov. This fictional hero, a convict of noble birth, a memoirist and thinker, was familiar with the same events of life in a military prison as Dostoevsky was; he confronted the same hardships of penal servitude but experienced and interpreted these ordeals as an ‘‘other’’ individual, another ‘‘I.’’ Dostoevsky did not treat his protagonist Gorianchikov as a conventional storyteller who simply ventriloquized the author’s ideas. Quite to the contrary, he portrayed Gorianchikov as a mimetically persuasive image, an individual personality, and not the author’s alter ego.2 In his ‘‘Scenes from the House of the Dead’’ (Gorianchikov’s title of his memoirs) he devoted a long chapter entitled ‘‘Companions’’ to a largely sympathetic depiction of a group of Polish insurgents, his fellow prisoners, also of noble birth. Notes from the House of the Dead—a work written by a former political prisoner that depicted the morbid living conditions of criminal and political convicts locked in a penal colony, would never have seen the light of day if not for the new situation created in Russian culture by the ‘‘Great Reforms’’ of 1861–63. Supported by the liberating spirit of the era, Dostoevsky, nevertheless, had difficulties with the publication of his chapter that portrayed the Poles. Prepared for Vremia, May 1862, it was not approved by the censor; the issue included only chapters 7, 9, and 10, signaling the existence of the omitted chapter 8 by a set of dots.3 In December 1862, Dostoevsky received permission to have this chapter published, and it was included in the last issue of his journal.4 But the two-volume collection of his works that was published earlier in 1862 did not have this chapter. Dostoevsky restored it only in the 1865 edition of his Collected Works, and then omitted it again in the 1875 edition. Thus most of his readers were familiar with the incomplete text of Notes (without the chapter on Polish prisoners). Therefore, when in February 1876, in Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky chose to discuss one of his most important subjects, ‘‘On the Love of the People. The Necessary Contact with the People: Peasant Marey,’’ and there addressed his own prison experience of entering into contact with convicts from the Russian lower class and those from the Polish well-educated classes, he had widened rather than bridged the gap between Diary and Notes, as well as between himself and his fictional authorhero Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov. In Notes from the House of the Dead the necessity to discriminate between Dostoevsky’s autobiographical ‘‘I’’ and the personality of his fictional character Gorianchikov provided a challenging task. Contemporary readers of Notes knew that the author of the novel and the author-hero shared a common existential experience; readers also realized that Gorianchikov was shown as a talented person capable of sharing with Dostoevsky the civic stance of his 101

Nina Perlina writings. Moreover, the prison house, the house of the dead, had never been made into the subject of a literary work in Russia, and in order to have his novel published Dostoevsky had to dissipate the misgivings of the censorship authorities. It was clear to ‘‘a perspicacious reader’’ that the differentiations in the biographies of Dostoevsky and Gorianchikov as well as the substitution of the latter for the former were determined by Dostoevsky’s demonstrative obedience to the censorship. Such a reader introduced his own additional sociopolitical accents into Gorianchikov’s notes and associated this poly-accented ideological discourse with the humane stance of Dostoevsky’s own writings. A noncultured reader simply mistook Gorianchikov for Dostoevsky. The writer, however, anticipated both types of responsive attitudes to the author/hero relation and adapted both types of readerly attitudes in the architectonic and composition of Notes. Dostoevsky intentionally blurred the boundary between the compatibility and nonidentity of his own ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘I’’ of the other, and used this undifferentiated narrative position to express that striving to discover the Truth which was shared by both the fictional author and the real author, and their readers. The inherent inferiority and limitedness of the hero’s cultural horizon implied the qualitative superiority and breadth of the author’s horizon. By defining the position of his hero as that of ‘‘another I’’ Dostoevsky the author secured for himself the prerogative to return later, whenever necessary, to Gorianchikov’s text and to reconsider its structure and major themes from the standpoint of those positions which were not yet known to him at the time of his composing the novel. Thus, even before he had actually begun his Notes from the House of the Dead, he already treated the contents of this work as a sort of prospectus of various ideational positions of his future protagonists. In other words, he anticipated that the point of view and the main ideas of Notes would be reinterpreted not only by him but also by various readers, critics, and supporters.5 Within this anticipated open-ended context, the scenes recorded by Dostoevsky’s author-hero Gorianchikov were presented as a subject open to reinterpretation from a position other than Gorianchikov’s—a position that might be compatible with Gorianchikov’s but could never be identical to the sum total of his views. The creation of such a complex, multifocal vision of reality required from Dostoevsky a very cautious and thoughtful selection of prototypes for his Notes from the House of the Dead, while, on the other hand, it allowed him to narrate on various open-ended if not irresolvable problems, individual stories, and prison realia not from his own point of view but from the position of Gorianchikov. In this essay, I trace the shifting perspectives, as well as the complex interpersonal relations, between Dostoevsky, Gorianchikov, and their Polish fellow prisoners. The interference of Dostoevsky’s own views with his hero’s becomes extremely complicated at the deepest plane of the novel that treats ethnicity as an ontological category, that is, ‘‘our people’’ as a confessionally singular and unique ethical and religious entity, or, in Gorianchikov’s depiction, the Russian people as opposed to the Poles. It is very important to remember, however, 102

Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners that this structure of interfering perspectives in the novel can be perceived only from outside, that is, from the perspective of someone other than the real or the fictional author. In the textual framework of Notes, religious persuasions of the Poles are not discussed by Gorianchikov, and the actual author of the novel does not allude to spiritual values of his Polish fellow prisoners. A challenging attempt at interpreting Notes from the position of the ‘‘other’’ is found in the memoirs of the Polish insurgent Szymon Tokarzewski, who was imprisoned in Omsk at the same time as Dostoevsky and who found himself depicted in the novel as Gorianchikov’s ‘‘comrade’’ T—kii.6 Tokarzewski was certainly familiar with the complete text of Notes from the House of the Dead as it was published in Vremia in 1861 and again in 1865. But it was not until 1876, when he read, in the February issue of Vremia, Diary of a Writer, in which Dostoevsky related an emotional account of the regeneration of his convictions and of his attitudes toward Russian lower-class convicts, that Tokarzewski, as a Polish revolutionary, felt compelled to provide his own complementary and polemical counterpart to Dostoevsky’s depictions of the ‘‘House of the Dead.’’ Tokarzewski chose to define himself as ‘‘the other’’ in relation to Dostoevsky, the political and religious thinker, the author of works conceived in the Omsk prison but written years later. In his memoirs he juxtaposed Gorianchikov’s unspecific cultural outlook and Dostoevsky’s distinctly aggressive geo-political outlook. According to Tokarzewski, he and a few other Polish confederates who served their sentence in Omsk were overjoyed when they heard about the arrival of two Russian political exiles (Dostoevsky and Durov) in their prison. ‘‘When the two men arrived in Omsk and settled with me under one roof, it seemed to me that I saw two still lights shining in the gloomy Northern sky.’’7 However, further contacts with Fyodor Dostoevsky frustrated Tokarzewski: this talented Russian writer and ‘‘revolutionary’’ was hostile to the cause of Polish independence and was eager to express his militant nationalistic and patriotic feelings.8 In his memoirs Tokarzewski reflected on both, the definitive text of Notes from the House of the Dead (1865) and Dostoevsky’s semiautobiographical chapters published in Diary of a Writer; he therefore challenged Dostoevsky’s rather than Gorianchikov’s views. At every instance where the hero acted as a more tolerant narrator than the actual author, Tokarzewski abstained from polemics with Gorianchikov but objected to Dostoevsky’s views. He thus took into consideration Dostoevsky’s unuttered words and argued against passages written in invisible ink.9 One important issue in Notes and in Tokarzewski’s memoirs was the way that the lower-class convicts treated the ‘‘gentlemen’’ (blagorodnye) and the way that the intellectuals, the political prisoners, behaved in response. Finding a proper modus operandi in the hostile environment of other convicts was the highest priority both for the Polish insurgents and for the Russian ‘‘gentlemen’’—Gorianchikov and Dostoevsky. Different as they were, the Poles, the Russian author, and his fictional hero sought the solution of this problem 103

Nina Perlina within the same I–Other or We–They framework, although the eventual outcome of the search was different in every case. Gorianchikov (as he repeatedly stated) defined his position in life as that of a dignified, independent person. Although Gorianchikov (a prisoner of noble origin) understood the position from which the lower-class convicts viewed their own social status and their human dignity, he was not quite willing to accept this view as correct, and therefore the chasm that separated him from the others remained unbridged. Only the moment of illumination he experienced during the Easter service made him realize that the barriers separating him from the other prisoners had disappeared and that he no longer had any need to distinguish himself from the other neschastnye (unfortunates.) Their thoughts became his, and his feelings were theirs. In other words, they became those from whom Gorianchikov, as a Russian Orthodox Christian, did not distinguish himself anymore. However, the harsh school of ethical reeducation Gorianchikov underwent in the penal colony did not allow him to reach the conclusions that Dostoevsky derived from his own years of ordeal. Dostoevsky’s formula, ‘‘Everyone is guilty for everybody’’ (which is at the core of the idea of ‘‘neschastnye,’’ the wretches, and which characterizes the true uniqueness of the ethical and religious feelings of the Russian people) is to be found not in Notes but in Diary of a Writer and in Brothers Karamazov—that is, in works that re-collect, re-experience, and reconsider the sum total of thoughts and feelings he once shared with his hero, Gorianchikov. Gorianchikov believed that, since the Poles were unable to share this communal moral responsibility of the Russian people, they isolated themselves and therefore alienated themselves from all other prisoners. Their reserve and ‘‘insultingly deliberate politeness’’ toward the other convicts was repaid with a special dislike.10 Surrounded by spite and lack of understanding, the Poles, in Gorianchikov’s perception, could not forget the humiliating episodes of corporal punishment to which they were subjected as criminals. To quote Dostoevsky’s later reformulation of the perspective of his fictional author in Diary of a Writer, hostile to everything they found in Russia and separated from their native land, ‘‘the Poles in those days endured much more than we.’’11 Tokarzewski did not comment on the hero’s position in Dostoevsky’s novel, but his memoirs demonstrate that he had read both Notes from the House of the Dead and Diary of a Writer very carefully. In his memoirs he identified himself as a Polish patriot stripped of a nobleman’s privileges for his subversive activities. He was willing to be with other convicts in their deprivation, but his awareness that punishment was imposed on him for sharing the common cause of his nation distinguished him from the other prisoners, and he therefore had no need to ignore the differences or seek integration with the rest of the prisoners.12 In refutation of Gorianchikov’s (or Dostoevsky’s) claim, that it was because of their pride that the Poles kept the ‘‘brigands’’ ‘‘at a dignified distance,’’ Tokarzewski wrote about the simple Russian people with great respect: ‘‘In the remote regions of Russia and Siberia the common people 104

Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners treat the convicts with great clemency and give them alms that the convicts accept gratefully. ‘Neschastnyi’—this is how a simple person would address the convict, hand him a bread roll or a kopeck, and add: ‘Take my gift and let Christ save you, poor wretch.’ . . . To me, these words have always been the utmost expression of Christian love, and perhaps, if society were to adopt this view of the criminals, it would be the best of social systems.’’13 Moved as he was by the genuine Christian feelings of the Russian people, Tokarzewski knew well, however, that he was not a neschastnyi but a political insurgent, and therefore he declined the alms politely. His unwillingness to accept alms did not indicate his dignified distancing of himself from all the simple Russians, but it did render impossible the desire of a Russian to share the burden of a Polish patriot. And it was love for his Polish motherland and his Catholic faith that gave Tokarzewski strength to endure moral and physical suffering. The ontological foundations of Dostoevsky’s and Tokarzewski’s beliefs postulated the same inseparable identity of the land and the faith of one’s forebears, but the substantial meaning of the two ontologies was different: Polish motherland and Catholic faith, and Russian motherland and Russian Orthodox Christianity. According to Tokarzewski, Dostoevsky’s militant passion for imperial expansion, his conviction that Constantinople should belong to Russia, and his embittered hatred of Roman Catholicism rendered the validity of any other cultural and religious position impossible. Several episodes in Tokarzewski’s memoirs provided a counterweight to his opponent’s position and answered questions Dostoevsky and his fictional author-hero refused to discuss. The episode, related specifically to this subject, can be found in the chapter ‘‘The Hospital.’’ In this chapter Gorianchikov wants to know the state of mind of a nobleman undergoing corporal punishment, and for that purpose questions his Polish companion. Tokarzewski in his memoirs answers the question: I pressed to my heart the icon of Holy Mother of God. I wanted to pray but could not remember a single word of a prayer. I only repeated with every blow [of a rod]: ‘To the glory of thee, The Queen of the Polish Crown, To the deliverance of thee, sweet Motherland.’ Did I feel pain during the punishment?—No. Did I see my torturers?— No. The surroundings disappeared from my gaze, I saw only radiant circles in front of me. Probably, in this violent moment my soul separated from my body and was transferred to an unearthly space. I have the temerity to insist that in moments of religious and patriotic ecstasy, a person is insensitive to physical pain.14

Here the opponent provided an argument whose persuasiveness Dostoevsky could hardly parry. And indeed, in his novel, the writer resorted to inadequate substitutions. First, to represent an innocent sufferer for the Polish cause he chose two different Poles (M-kii and Zh-kii) instead of Tokarzewski. Second, he played down T-kii’s intellectual strength, and thus invalidated him 105

Nina Perlina as an independent and convincing supporter of another ontological system. Third, he made Gorianchikov’s account of the sufferings of the Poles part of a broader juxtaposition of contexts: ‘‘We–They, Ours–Theirs.’’ Within this juxtaposition he made Gorianchikov emphasize the fact that among the Polish confederates there was no mutual agreement and unanimity. Thus Gorianchi˙ kov remembered that an old professor Zh-kii (Zochowski), who received a hundred strokes upon his arrival in the prison, was disliked by his own countrymen B-kii and T-kii (Boguslawski and Tokarzewski). Tokarzewski, on the con˙ trary, wrote about Zochowski with great respect: this much beloved old professor possessed a unique talent to comfort him in the moments of despair and timorousness, when Tokarzewski conceived of suicide and was near to losing his faith in the immortality of the soul.15 Juxtaposing documentary materials and the text of House of the Dead helps to understand how Dostoevsky manipulated Wahrheit in order to arrive at the more encompassing Dichtung in his creative works. Gorianchikov remains evasive about whether his Polish companions (whom he names only by their initials) were kept in the same barrack as he. From Tokarzewski we learn that the Poles, the Circassians, the Jew Isay Fomich, the Old Believers, Dostoevsky, and Durov were kept in the same barrack. From the files of the Russian Military-Historical Archive (Rossiiskii voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv) one also learns the names of eight (rather than six) Polish insurgents, who served their sentence together with Dostoevsky.16 Like Dostoevsky, his Polish fellow prisoners were condemned under the law used for field courts-martial, ˙ and three of them (Mirecki, Tokarzewski, and Zochowski) were sentenced to death. Like Dostoevsky, they did not know that the verdict issued by the Highest Confirmation had called for a mock execution. Like Dostoevsky, they, too, underwent the extraordinary experience of believing that they had been only moments away from certain death. In his letters, in several passages from his novels, and in numerous autobiographical entries in Diary of a Writer Dostoevsky describes the tormenting experience of a person who, at least for a few endless moments, was tortured by fear of imminent destruction. Dostoevsky’s descriptions, however, bear no allusions to the feelings of those ‘‘others’’ who, like him, were dangling between death and immortality but who did not share his religious beliefs and who abstained from his Russian nationalism, instead cherishing the idea of a seIf-sacrificial love for their ‘‘sweet Polish motherland.’’ Viewing prison memoirs written by Dostoevsky and his Polish fellow prisoners as mutually complementary, yet conflicting counterparts, one can clearly see that, for Dostoevsky, his ethnic identity derived from his confessional persuasions of a Russian Orthodox Christian. As a nationalist he was not so much a Slavophile as a supporter of Pan-Slavism (an imperialistic religious and political doctrine whose foundations are in Russian Orthodox Christianity). As an illustration of the kind of factual sources Dostoevsky did not allow ˙ into his creative works I provide a short summary of Józef Zochowski’s court 106

Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners ˙ file: Józef Zochowski, author of two books: Philosophy of the Heart or Practical Wisdom (1845) and Life of Jesus Christ (1847); Master of Philosophy and Administration; gymnasium professor, Catholic; married; father of four sons and one daughter; accepted the position of bank clerk with the salary of 156 zloty; and accused of instigating the Poles in the Catholic Church to rise and to regain their lost freedom. A day before he committed his insidious action, ˙ Zochowski confessed his intention to a priest. In his explanation submitted to ˙ the Commission of Inquiry Zochowski stated: Living in extreme poverty and often lacking the money to buy bread and yet unable to bring himself to commit the sin of suicide, he formed the intention to appeal publicly to the people to rise in rebellion and thus either to perish or to win the fame of a hero. . . . This action he performed in full consciousness . . . and although he is perfectly aware of being guilty and does not dare to hope for a pardon, yet if, beyond all expectations, he were pardoned, without being extracted from the grievous situation in which he presently finds himself along with his family, then, in all honesty, he would have to state that he could not accept such an act of mercy, because the desperate circumstances which he has been enduring for so long would drive him into a state of frenzy. If, however, he were to receive a position that would enable him to support his family, he would become a truly faithful subject [of His Imperial Majesty].17

˙ By the decision of the Judicial Committee Zochowski was condemned to death by execution, but the army commander in Poland, Paskevich-Erivanskii, ˙ while issuing this confirmation, took into account both Zochowski’s repentance as a Christian and his voluntary confession to the Commission of In˙ quiry. At the place of the military execution it was announced to Zochowski that ‘‘he is released from death and instead sentenced to ten years of penal ˙ servitude in Siberia.’’ Considering the desperate situation of Zochowski’s wife and children, Paskevich (this ‘‘deus ex machina’’ bureaucratica) chose to re˙ compense Zochowski according to his faith, not according to his subversive ˙ words or deeds. Paskevich requested financial support for the family: Zochowski’s sons were placed in a foster school, his wife and daughter were alotted a ˙ small pension, and his debts were paid by the government. Zochowski himself died in 1851, three years after his arrival at Omsk prison. ˙ This extract from Zochowski’s file reads like a program for the life of a hero within the framework of a Dostoevsky novel. Rendered in the language of ˙ a judicial case, Zochowski’s life story contains, in a nutshell, a realization of Dostoevsky’s most central poetic metaphors: ‘‘abyss of despair,’’ ‘‘the turmoil of a heart,’’ the importance of Job’s temptation, self-sacrifice for one’s neighbors, as well as Dostoevsky’s ultimate justification: ‘‘not faith from a miracle, but a miracle from faith.’’ An interpreter of Notes from the House of the Dead can surmise that the Poles never discussed with Dostoevsky verdicts of the Judicial Committees about their subversive activities. But himself a ‘‘political criminal’’ accused under military code, Dostoevsky could not be ignorant about the 107

Nina Perlina fact that, under the law used for field courts-martial, all sorts of insurgents should have been condemned to death, and that therefore, in the case of his Polish companions, penal servitude took the place of a death sentence. In all his works, however, Dostoevsky abstained from allusions to the fates of his Polish fellow prisoners. NOTES 1. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972–90), 20:170 (hereafter, PSS). 2. Dostoevsky’s treatment of Gorianchikov as a responsible, independent ‘‘ideologist’’ illustrates Bakhtin’s fundamental theoretical statements on polyphony and on ‘‘the author’s architectonically stable and dynamically living relationship to the hero.’’ For a comprehensive understanding of Bakhtin’s philosophy of art, see his Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. and comm. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 4–22. A thorough analysis of ‘‘author and hero in aesthetic activity’’ as it can be traced through the textual fabric of Notes from the House of the Dead is beyond the subject of this essay. 3. In 1862 Vremia was published under the supervision of Censor P. Dubrovsky, who provided no reason for the refusal to allow the chapter to be printed. Most likely Dubrovsky, unable to comprehend new regulations promulgated by a preliminary censorship statute of March 10, 1862, decided to be more rigid than ever and banned all the camouflaged allusions to the Polish uprising of 1848. 4. Dostoevskii, PSS, 4:275–78 (commentary). 5. Compare, for instance, the first mention of katorga (penal servitude) as a thematic and ideational unit in Dostoevsky’s letter of January–February 1854 to his brother Mikhail: ‘‘How many types and characters from among the common people I brought out from prison! I got accustomed to them, and therefore I think I have a decent knowledge of them. How many stories of vagrants and robbers and in general of the whole dark and wretched side of life! . . . All in all, the time hasn’t been lost for me. If I have come to know not Russia, then the Russian people well, and as well as perhaps few people know them,’’ and his later comment concerning the project of Notes: ‘‘These Notes from the House of the Dead have taken on a full and definite plan in my head now. . . . I vouch for their interest. The interest will be most capital.’’ To M. Dostoevsky, October 9, 1859, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, ed. and trans. David A. Lowe and Ronald Meyer, 5 vols. (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988–91), 1:190, 390. For the Russian, see Dostoevskii, PSS, 9:172–73, 348–49. 6. Szymon Tokarzewski, Poˇsród cywilnie umarlych: Obrazki z zˇ ycia Polaków na Syberyi (Warsaw, 1800); idem, Zbieg: Wspomnienia z Sybiru (Warsaw: Sk™ad Wolfa, 1913); idem, Siedem lat katorgi, 1846–1857: pami˛etniki Szymona Tokarzewskiego (Seven years of Katorga, 1846–1857: Memoirs of Szymon Tokarzewski) (Warsaw: Sk™ad Wolfa, 1912). Several passages from Tokarzewski’s memoirs were also included in a biographical essay: V. Khranevich, ‘‘F. M. Dostoevskii po vospominaniiam ssyl’nogo poliaka,’’ Russkaia starina 2 (1910): 367–76; 3:605–21. Joseph Frank, author of a voluminous study of Dostoevsky’s biography, has produced persuasive evidence of Tokarzewski’s objective and nonprejudicial depiction of F. Dostoevsky as his fellow prisoner; see Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 110–14.

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Dostoevsky and His Polish Fellow Prisoners 7. Frank, Dostoevsky, 111. 8. According to Tokarzewski, the author-hero Gorianchikov did not reveal xenophobia, whereas Fyodor Dostoevsky himself, perhaps of Polish roots, ‘‘hated Poles. . . . He used to say that if he knew that there was one drop of Polish blood in his veins he would immediately let it out. How painful it was to listen to this conspirator, to this man condemned because of [his love of ] freedom and progress, confessing that he would feel happy when all the nations were dominated by Russia. He never said that Ukraine, Volynia, Podolia, Lithuania, and finally the whole of Poland were annexed territories but insisted that all these lands were Russia’s eternal possession’’ (Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi, 168). Dostoevsky, whose xenophobia and militant passion for imperial expansion Tokarzewski much too well remembered, referred to the commonality of prison experience and their social and intellectual interests in order to emphasize momentary outbursts of hostility to each other’s ethnic and religious values 9. The dominant mode of Dostoevsky’s pronouncements bespoke his conviction that Constantinople should have belonged to Russia as well as his envenomed hatred of Roman Catholicism. ‘‘Once Dostoevsky recited his poem for us, an ode describing an anticipated entry of the victorious Russian army into Constantinople. The ode was indeed beautiful, but none of us hurried to compliment him, and I asked him: [in Russian] ‘And haven’t you an ode for the return trip?’ He reddened with anger, and springing at my face, called me an ignoramus and a barbarian’’ (Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi, 169). As is known from Dostoevsky’s biography, his ode ‘‘On European Events in 1854’’ was written in April 1854 and remained unpublished until 1883 (Dostoevskii, PSS, 2:519–20). Tokarzewski refers to the preliminary idea of the poem that Dostoevsky had possibly put together while still in the prison camp. 10. Dostoevskii, PSS, 4:26. 11. Ibid., 22:50. 12. Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi, 154, 158. 13. Quoted from Khranevich, ‘‘F. M. Dostoevskii,’’ 375–76. 14. Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi, 87. 15. Dostoevskii, PSS, 4:210; Tokarzewski, Siedem lat katorgi, 148. 16. Gorianchikov did not refer to Polish prisoners Korczynski ´ and Musia™owicz by name, yet he described them as ‘‘not well educated, but honest, straightforward, and forthright’’ young men. Musia™owicz and Wróblewski (he was mentioned in Musialowicz’s judicial case) have reemerged as stereotyped caricatures of Polish noblemen in Brothers Karamazov. 17. Rossiiskii voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, fond 801, opis’ 109/86, no. 12.

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Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question Poland and Reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches Manon de Courten

The philosopher, publicist, and poet Vladimir Solov’ëv (1853–1900) continues to intrigue his readers. He proposed a unique role for Poland as a mediator between Eastern and Western Christianity. Since Poland, or at least part of it, belonged to the Russian Empire, a logical step was to understand this role as a part of Russia’s regenerating mission in the world. As a result, Solov’ëv approached the Polish question from a primarily religious and moral, Russocentric and future-oriented perspective. His ideas bear the stamp of the Slavophile worldview into which he wove liberal principles, and yet he never belonged fully to any camp, as I will show. The originality and richness of his views present a challenging picture in our consideration of Russian identity in its encounter with Poland. Solov’ëv wrote against the stream on the Polish question. His writings extend from 1883 until 1898, a period when the wave of interest in the Polish question that had dominated the 1870s had disappeared, having been eclipsed by other problems connected with the new era of reaction under Alexander III.1 The pressure exercised by the regime in applying strict censorship to publications did not prevent him from voicing two primary concerns, which 110

Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question targeted the two basic institutions of his country, church and state: first, the religious antagonism between Orthodox Russia and Catholic Poland, and, second, the policy of Russification that his own government was imposing on Poland. Solov’ëv was eager to see the realization of a true Christian society or ‘‘free theocracy’’ on earth, with its beginnings within the boundaries of Russia.2 His concern with the Polish question was connected to the goal he began to pursue of a reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic churches.3 First, he formulated his conception of Russia’s mission in universal history so as to include church reunion: Russia had a crucial role to play in the resolution of the great schism that was tearing humanity apart, namely, the schism between East and West. As the leading Orthodox country, Russia could and should pave the way by first reconciling with Poland and building a religious union with Catholic Poland. The role of Poland was to act on behalf of Catholicism in effecting this reunion of the two churches. Second, establishing a Christian society on earth also implied that the Russian nation should act according to Christian principles of love and justice. The Russian government was, however, doing just the opposite in its treatment of its Polish lands. This led Solov’ëv to fiercely denounce the policy of forced Russification and to advocate for religious tolerance.4 Nevertheless, he did not stop believing in the possibility of a spiritual reconciliation between Poland and Russia, and from this perspective he suggested a common veneration of the icon of our Lady of Cz˛estochowa, an ancient Byzantine icon of the Virgin on Polish territory. He also identified Poland as a prophet-nation, an example of a true, self-sacrificing nation, as Adam Mickiewicz had earlier argued.5 Obviously a shift of priorities took place through the years. Solov’ëv’s first and most lasting concern was the Russian mission in universal history, including church reunion, an objective that he only gradually abandoned. His second concern was the more specific issue of the cultural and religious persecution of Poles, and the third was the implicit substitution of the idea of church reunion for that of a spiritual union of Poland and Russia. Since on this last point he was indebted to Mickiewicz, it is Solov’ëv’s two other views that must be integrated in the Russian debate of his time if we are to understand his position in its originality and complexity.6 The Russian press was united in regarding the occupation of Polish territories as fully justified.7 There was accordingly no question of restoring Polish political independence. The debates of the time were dominated instead by the question of the extent to which the autonomy of Poland within the Russian Empire should be preserved or diminished. Surveys of literature on the Polish question and separate publications have allowed me to resituate Solov’ëv within the debate in the Russian press of his time.8 I have identified three main currents of thought with respect to the Polish question in Russian society: Slavophiles, who wrote prior to Solov’ëv but whose influence could still be felt in the debates, and, in Solov’ëv’s time, liberals and conservative nationalists. Solov’ëv’s view of Poland was close to the Slavophile perspective. Indeed, 111

Manon de Courten he shared with the Slavophiles a basic identification of Poland with Western civilization and, more specifically, with Catholicism. This view was the logical result of a conception of universal history as a battlefield between East and West. Iurii Samarin identified these with Slavdom and Latinity, respectively.9 In the Polish gentry and clergy he discerned ‘‘Polonism’’ and stigmatized it as the armed propaganda of Latinity and its striving to impose its rule.10 In a similar stance, Solov’ëv characterized Poland as bearing within itself an extreme feature of Western civilization, namely, individualism, as a result of which it was doomed to fail.11 He regarded the eighteenth-century Polish regime as a whole as the embodiment of ‘‘the extreme of Western individualism.’’12 This individualism was typical of the gentry (szlachta), which, by abusing its privileged position, had concentrated within itself Polish society and politics. ‘‘All the force of Poland was in the szlachta, and Poland died,’’ Solov’ëv wrote. ‘‘It did not die because it possessed a strong gentry, for this was a privilege, but because its gentry, instead of being a social class organized to serve the state and to rule over the people, transformed itself into a class that ruled without limits and included the state in itself.’’13 For both Samarin and Solov’ëv, Russian occupation had put an end to the tyrannical domination of the gentry and favored Poland’s free development, a right every nationality (narodnost’) had.14 Samarin emphasized another major point: he viewed Poland as a combination of a Slavic ethnicity and a Catholic religiosity. Convinced of his conception of Polonism, he encouraged the Russian authorities to seek conciliation not with the gentry or clergy but with the common people, who were ethnically close to the Russians.15 Solov’ëv took over Samarin’s ideas about Catholicism and Slav ethnicity in Poland. But he went further in two respects, namely, by valorizing Catholicism positively and by assigning to Poland a role in solving the universal schism. While the Slavophiles saw the conflict in its universal scope as unsolvable, and sometimes regarded the Poles as irremediably separated from and traitors to the Slav world, Solov’ëv used the Polish situation as an opportunity to overcome the schism. Poland could act on behalf of Catholicism.16 In his eyes Catholicism, with its seat in Rome, represented a unity and authority received from tradition which Orthodoxy lacked. Poland, being religiously affiliated with Catholicism, could work as the mediator in a reconciliation and contribute to the reunification of the churches.17 Poland bore within itself this universal conflict between East and West. The reason why Solov’ëv did not deal with similar cases, such as Croats, also Catholic Slavs, but focused only on Poland, and more precisely that very part of former Poland under Russian rule, was that Poland belonged to the destiny of Russia by virtue of its annexation to the Russian Empire. This underlies Solov’ëv’s definition of the Polish question as one of the vital problems that the Russian nation had to solve. It was part and parcel of the Russian problem. Characteristic of his treatment of ideals and their implementation, Solov’ëv limited his message to this general exhortation and did not propose concrete measures for a rapprochement between Orthodoxy

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Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question and Catholicism. However, in a period marked by strong anti-Catholic feelings in Russia, the disturbing effect of his call should not be underestimated. Solov’ëv departed from the Slavophile view of Orthodox Russia in his perspective on the future. Primarily preoccupied with the past ideal of communal Russia, the Slavophiles viewed their fatherland as only a ‘‘guardian of Christianity,’’ not as a nation capable of regenerating it.18 Solov’ëv’s futureoriented perspective contrasted sharply with the Slavophiles’ focus on the past and received full expression in his messianic conception of Russia. Opposing the notion of a national mission based in intolerance and aggressive nationalism, he repeatedly emphasized the necessity to understand Russia’s mission not as a privilege but as a moral obligation, a service (sluzhenie).19 Treatment of the Polish territories in his view was a test case for Russia’s Christian or nonChristian attitude. This concern with religious and moral principles and with their concrete implementation may very well have prompted him to criticize the Slavophiles for the absence of such a practical or political commitment. Samarin had not been concerned to put his idealistic views into practice. Solov’ëv criticized the discrepancy between theoretical views—Samarin advocated freedom of cultural development and religious confession—and the non-application of these to actual situations, which led to religious fanaticism. The same criticism was aimed at Dostoevsky, whose chauvinism Solov’ëv explicitly condemned.20 Walicki has argued that it was precisely Solov’ëv’s position with respect to the Polish question, especially his liberalism and his heterodox messianism, combined with his growing fascination with Roman Catholicism, that played a key role in distancing him from the Slavophiles.21 This conclusion seems only partly justified. Solov’ëv’s early writings appeared in Rus’, the journal of the Slavophile Ivan Aksakov. In his later publications, however, after he had left Rus’, in spite of his criticism of the Slavophiles’ purely theoretical preoccupations and in spite of his un-Slavophile appreciation of Catholicism, he still shared with the Slavophiles two key positions: the conceptual framework of universal history and the understanding of Poland and the Polish question from a religious perspective, that is, in terms of an antagonism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism or between East and West.22 The case of Poland shows that Solov’ëv shifted the Slavophile worldview, which was centered on Orthodoxy, traditional Russia, and theoretical ideals, and had a historical orientation toward an ecumenical messianism that demanded concrete realization of principles and was, by definition, future-oriented. Solov’ëv’s effort to distance himself from the Slavophiles in the mid-1880s was accompanied by a rapprochement with the liberals. He started to publish regularly in their organ, Vestnik Evropy, and by the end of the 1880s closely collaborated with the editorial board and attended the weekly meetings at the office of the editor in chief Matvei Stasiulevich, circumstances that, as far as the conservative press was concerned, placed him on a par with the liberals.23

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Manon de Courten The most prominent liberals, who—each in his own way—committed themselves to the Polish cause, were the historian Nikolai Kareev and the lawyer and publicist Vladimir Spasovich.24 Solov’ëv shared their liberal principles in regard to the Polish question. Their defense of free cultural development and religious practice for Poles logically prompted them to condemn the policy of Russification. The period after the 1863 uprising was characterized by intensified reforms aimed at eliminating characteristic features of Polish life and bringing the Poles gradually into the Russian family. Three sets of reforms were implemented—in agriculture, administration, and culture. The cultural reforms were especially painful, involving as they did the imposition of the Russian language in education and the persecution of the Catholic Church (monasteries were suppressed, ecclesiastic goods confiscated, financial control by the Russian authorities introduced).25 Solov’ëv condemned the ‘‘forced Russification in the borderlands,’’ the ‘‘injustice [. . .] of the abominable system of Russification [. . .] which attacks national existence and the very soul of the Polish people.’’26 Solov’ëv referred to the cultural achievements of Poland, by virtue of which it should be considered a nation. Without elaborating on the measures taken to repress Polish culture, Solov’ëv made clear his opposition to the assimilation of Poland into Russian culture. Equally short and incisive were his pronouncements against the persecution of Catholic Poles. The principle of religious freedom was central for him and follows from his preoccupation with the fate of the Jews and, to a lesser extent, of the Uniates within the Russian Empire. Russian occupation itself was not called into question. In this connection he agreed with the liberals on the positive valuation of the agrarian reform in Poland. He interpreted the distribution of land to the freed peasants as the emancipation of peasants and the liberation of Poland from the ‘‘fatal antagonism’’ between the gentry and peasants. Solov’ëv also shared, especially with Kareev, the idea that Russian occupation protected Poland from Germanization, which was considered a real danger.27 Of particular interest is the friendship between Solov’ëv and Vladimir Spasovich, an insider in the Polish question and close collaborator of Vestnik Evropy. Spasovich was a Polish jurist who actively supported the promotion of Polish culture, called for loyalty to the tsarist government, and rejected the idea of Poland’s independence. Not considering Polish political independence necessary for the moment, he believed in reconciliation between Russia and Poland on the basis of equal civil status. These two points also constitute the core of Solov’ëv’s contributions. Against the Polish advocates of independence, he argued that no political autonomy was possible because the internal antagonism in Poland between the gentry and the common people remained active until his time and posed a major obstacle to building a state.28 Poles still lacked ‘‘the very first necessary conditions for political restoration.’’29 More diplomatically he proposed asking the Poles themselves in a plebiscite which state they preferred to belong to.30 In any event, Solov’ev was disappointed to find that, instead of being con-

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Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question cerned with his goal of reconciliation between East and West, the Poles seemed to be focused on their own national revival.31 These statements show that Solov’ev’s approach to Poland was quite different from that of the liberals. Analysis of historical events, of the implementation of policies, and of agrarian reforms, and concern for the concrete situation in general, all typifying Kareev’s approach, were alien to Solov’ëv. In his critique of the treatment of the Polish question in the Russian press, Kareev condemned exactly this reduction of Polish society to gentry and peasantry, and the use of clichés.32 Another difference in approach concerns the political future of Poland. Spasovich and Kareev, as well as another well-known liberal, Boris Chicherin, defended the view that, although Poland had to be ruled then as part of the Russian Empire, a time would come when Poland would again become a state.33 Solov’ëv explicitly confessed his lack of concern for the form of political regime and did not consider it a primary necessity for Poland to be a state again. Not interested in the evolution of the political status of the Polish nation, he focused on the Christian attitude that Russia should have with respect to Poland and approached the Polish question from a moral perspective.34 This different focus may explain the absence of any response from the liberals to Solov’ëv’s views on Poland. It also determined another fundamental difference with the liberals. While, for Kareev, the Catholic faith was only one of the components of Polish identity, Solov’ëv focused on it to such an extent that he even valued Poland exclusively for its adherence to Catholicism and identified the Polish national idea with Catholicism. With respect to the conservative nationalists, Solov’ëv’s position was unequivocally and consistently critical. The representatives of conservative nationalism, like Konstantin Pobedonostsev and Mikhail Katkov, largely drew on the Slavophile worldview and mixed into it a reactionary politics. Solov’ëv responded to the statements made by the historian Bestuzhev-Riumin and the publicist I. S. Durnovo by explicitly rejecting their defense of the policy of Russification and religious persecution of the Catholic Poles. He argued that religious tolerance should be part of Orthodoxy, and accordingly of the Russian idea, and that it should be applied to Catholic Poles and to other religious minorities living on Russian soil, notably the Jews.35 Significantly the only reactions to Solov’ëv’s contributions came from the conservative nationalists. In the 1890s, two minor authors, the above-mentioned Durnovo and Dmitrii Ilovaiskii, put pen to paper to reply, in Moskovskie vedomosti, to Solov’ëv’s writings on the Polish question. Both engaged in a continuing polemic with Solov’ëv.36 Ilovaiskii criticized Solov’ëv for propagating ideas against the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state, especially with respect to the occupation of the Polish territories.37 Solov’ëv’s statements on the obligation to respect your neighbor’s religion and law only amounted to negating and humiliating the Orthodox Church in relation to Catholicism. Durnovo’s response was much more elaborate.38 Against Solov’ëv’s critique of intolerance,

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Manon de Courten Durnovo protested that the policy of Russification had not violated in any way the respect for Polish narodnost’. He argued that Solov’ëv was logically inconsistent in proposing a government policy based on respect for the free development of another narodnost’. Moreover, the principle of respect was subjective, negative, and led to nonparticipation in public affairs. For these reasons it could not serve as a basis for action by the Russian government, above all in the Polish territories. Notably these two responses to Solov’ëv’s writings concern his critique of Russian government policy, which obviously was serious enough to generate a strong reply.39 However, the hostility between Solov’ëv and the conservative nationalists should not conceal some points of convergence in their worldviews. A comparison with the writings of one of their representatives, the conservative publicist Vladimir Gringmut, on the Polish question makes it obvious that Solov’ëv shared with them faith in the Russian institutions of tsardom and Orthodox Church.40 But while this faith prompted the conservative nationalists to prohibit all criticism of these institutions, it motivated Solov’ëv to exhort them to act according to the Christian principles they embodied.41 Solov’ëv’s defense of Poland’s right of free cultural development and religious practice responded to actual persecutions taking place in Polish territories. However, this concern for freedom and respect eclipsed other social and economic realities in Poland. His views on the composition of Polish society were simplistic and outdated. For example, he wrote: ‘‘without any aptitudes to a strong state power, with the exclusively passive character of the peasant class, and with the absence of an urban class, Poland as a whole is represented by the szlachta alone.’’42 This striking quotation shows that Solov’ëv, until the 1860s, held to an image of Poland as it existed in the eighteenth century.43 By the 1880s, Polish society had become more complex than the conflict between gentry and peasants. An urban intelligentsia and a working class had emerged. Solov’ëv also held that Poland’s annexation by Russia proved to be economically valuable.44 On the one hand, the Polish area under Russian rule indeed experienced a tremendous economic growth, which exceeded the development of Prussian and Austrian Poland. On the other hand, this development was hardly owing to Russian tsardom, since Russia did not offer any assistance to the Polish economy by building infrastructure such as railways, sewage, or waterworks.45 As a consequence, it is impossible to speak of the Russian occupation in terms of active support and contributions to welfare in the Polish provinces, as Solov’ëv did.46 This stance reveals another constant feature in Solov’ëv’s perception of the Russian state, namely, his blindness to the strategic maneuvers of Russia in Poland. Russia strove to divide in order to strengthen its power, first by helping the gentry during the peasant uprising and then, after the uprising was crushed, by helping the peasants through agrarian reform. Russia indeed worked at reducing social differences, as Solov’ëv claimed, but at the same time strove to keep these two social groups separate, as is shown by the 116

Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question administrative measures imposed in the villages after the repression of the uprising.47 Moreover, his conclusion that Russia, by annexing Polish territories, had ‘‘guaranteed the future of the real, not only noble, and not only peasant, but Polish Poland,’’ was tantamount to stating that the ‘‘real Poland’’ was more Polish under Russian rule than as an independent state.48 This testifies to Solov’ëv’s belief in the essentially protective mission of Russia with respect to Poland.49 A twenty-first-century reader might contend that the Russian occupation had been the precondition for the policy of Russification that Solov’ëv so fiercely condemned. However, when recontextualized, this view can be understood as confirmation that his contemporaries approved of the Russian occupation and of Russia’s protective attitude with respect to Poland. Solov’ëv’s approach to the Polish question contributed to redefining his position in the Russian intellectual world of his time. He did not completely belong to any camp. From the Slavophiles he borrowed the framework of universal history with its division between East and West and its overly religious perspective. In the liberals he found support for the implementation of his principles in the actual conditions of the Polish cultural and religious minority. His critique of the state and the Orthodox Church, and of their leaders’ current attitude with respect to the Poles, namely, the policy of Russification and the religious persecution of the Catholic Poles, led to the accusation from the conservative nationalist party that he was immoral, decadent, and antipatriotic. Besides, the complete absence of a reaction on the liberals’ part to his treatment of the Polish question indicates that Solov’ëv, although undoubtedly esteemed for his defense of liberal principles, was actually too religious to be considered a valuable partner in discussions of the economic, social, and political aspects of the Polish question. His emphasis on church reunion could only provoke the protest of the conservatively minded Russians and fail to interest the liberals, populists, and socialists. Finally, his support of the Russian occupation of Poland and his disinterest in the political future of Poland were too conservative in the eyes of the Polish supporters of political independence. His unconventional approach led him to interpret events in moral and religious terms, thereby turning them into symbols and thus translating them into a higher, spiritual dimension. By the same token, he did not turn his back on the society and his time but rather sought to transform the relationship between Russia and Poland, to lift it onto a higher, moral level of solidarity and justice. NOTES This text forms the shortened version of a case study on Solov’ëv’s treatment of the Polish question, written as a chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation dealing with a critical analysis of Solov’ëv’s conception of history, entitled History, Sophia and the Russian Nation: A Reassessment of Vladimir Solov’ëv ‘s Views on History and His Social Commitment (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004). This contribution is made within the framework of the research program ‘‘Civil Society and National Religion: Problems of Church, State,

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Manon de Courten and Society in the Philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ëv (1853–1900),’’ financed by the Dutch Fund for Scientific Research (NWO). 1. For a comprehensive account on the Polish question before 1881, see Aleksandr Pypin, ‘‘Pol’skii vopros v russkoi literature,’’ Vestnik Evropy, no. 2 (1880): 703–36; no. 4 (1880): 686–709; no. 5 (1880): 239–71; no. 10 (1880): 681–711; no. 11 (1880): 281– 307. In contemporary scholarship, see Andreas Renner, Russischer Nationalismus und Öffentlichkeit im Zarenreich 1855–1875 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2000), chap. 3. 2. In contrast with today’s use of the term theocracy, Solov’ëv meant by this the concrete implementation of religion in the primary sense, that is, the link between God and human beings in the life of a nation. For the sake of clarity within the limits of this essay I have left aside this theme, which has complex ramifications in the work of the philosopher. For a profound analysis of Solov’ëv’s conception of free theocracy within his philosophy as a whole, see Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev et son oeuvre messianique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935); English translation: Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1980). 3. Vladimir Solov’ëv, ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ Rus’, no. 1 (1883): 20–30, published as an introduction to idem, Velikii spor i khristianskaia politika and reprinted as the introduction to Solov’ëv’s collection of publicistic articles Natsional’nyi vopros. Edition used: Vladimir Solov’ëv, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Pravda, 1989) (hereafter, S. 1989), 1:59–75; idem, ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 8 (1884): 755–72, in S. 1989, 1:206–56. 4. In 1887–89 Solov’ëv did so with ‘‘Grekhi Rossii,’’ unpublished during Solov’ëv’s lifetime. See Vladimir Solov’ëv, Sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (reprint, Brussels: Foyer Chrétien, 1966–70) (hereafter, SS], Pis’ma, 2:187–91. Edition used: S. 1989, 2:207– 11; idem, L’idée russe (Paris: Librairie académique Didier-Perrin et Cie, 1888), in Vladimir Soloviev, La Sophia et les autres écrits français (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1978), 83–102; idem, ‘‘Lettre à la rédaction du Przegl˛ad Polski,’’ Przeglad ˛ Polski, no. 92 (1889): 179–87; the version used here is the Russian translation, ‘‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Przegl˛ad Polski,’ ’’ in S. 1989, 2:267–72. On religious tolerance, see ‘‘Mir Vostoka i Zapada,’’ Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 1896; in S. 1989, 2:602–605; ‘‘Istoricheskii sfinks,’’ part 2 of ‘‘Iz voprosov kul’tury,’’ Vestnik Evropy, no. 7 (1893): 780–89; in S. 1989, 2:481–91. 5. ‘‘Pol’skaia natsional’naia tserkov’,’’ Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, no. 41 (1897); in SS, 9:61–70; ‘‘Mitskevich,’’ Mir Iskusstva 5 (1899): 27–30; in Vladimir Solov’ëv, Filosofiia iskusstva i literaturnaia kritika (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991), 371–79. 6. On the influence of Mickiewicz on Solov’ëv’s messianism, see Andrzej Walicki, ‘‘Solov’ëv’s Theocratic Utopia and Two Romantic Poets: Fëdor Tiutchev and Adam Mickiewicz,’’ in Vladimir Solov’ëv: Reconciler and Polemicist—Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Solov’ëv Conference Held in Nijmegen, in September 1998. ed. Wil van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, and Evert van der Zweerde, 473–83 (Leuven: Peters, 2000). 7. Condemnation of the 1863 Polish insurrection had been unanimous in Russian society. See Michel Heller, Histoire de la Russie et de son empire (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 792–94. A notable exception was Alexander Herzen, who supported the insurrectionists from London. See Andrzej Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 65–69. The present-day reader should not

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Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question expect a commitment in favor of national rights for Poles before the end of the 1890s, when their advocates, inspired by the Polish National League, were heard in Russia. 8. The following works in Russian treat the Polish question after 1881: M. Gakkebush, Ob avtonomii Pol’shi (Voskresiushchii Lazar’), 2nd ed. (n.p.: Tovarishchestvo I. D. Sytina, 1906); A. L. Pogodin, Glavnye techeniia pol’skoi politicheskoi mysli (1863–1907 gg.) (St. Petersburg: Knigoizdatel’skoe tovarishchestvo prosveshchenie, 1907); and the bibliographical work of N. A. Rubakin, Sredi knig. Opyt obzora russkikh knizhnykh bogatstv v sviazi s istoriei nauchno-filosofskikh i literaturno-obshchestvennykh idei, vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1915). References to authorial publications are given below. Solov’ëv is not mentioned in the surveys devoted to the Polish question, except in Rubakin. 9. According to Pypin, the most comprehensive, logical, and clear account among Slavophiles was provided by Iurii Samarin, in ‘‘Sovremennyi ob’’ëm pol’skogo voprosa’’ (first published in Den’, no. 38 [1863]) (Pypin, ‘‘Pol’skii vopros v russkoi literature,’’ Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 [1880]: 686 ff.). For an analysis of the Slavophile reaction specifically to the Polish uprising of 1863, see the essay by Andrzej Walicki in the present volume. 10. This identification of Western civilization with power, used in a visible form, such as the Catholic Church had developed, can be found already in Kireevskii as well as in the young Solov’ëv. On the evolution of Solov’ëv’s views with respect to the Catholic Church, see Jacqueline de Proyart, ‘‘Vladimir Soloviev et l’Eglise romaine. La naissance d’une conviction,’’ in Oecuménisme et Eschatologie selon Soloviev, ed. F.-X. de Guibert (Paris: F-X. de Guibert, 1994), 50–71. 11. In Solov’ëv’s ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros’’ and ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ as well as ‘‘Mir Vostoka i Zapada.’’ On the whole Solov’ëv highly valued Samarin’s work. 12. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Mir Vostoka i Zapada,’’ 603. 13. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ 250–51. See also idem, ‘‘Mir Vostoka i Zapada,’’ 603, and idem, ‘‘Mitskevich,’’ 376–77. 14. See Solov’ëv, ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ 65. Yet this did not involve the creation of a Polish state. Interestingly this position was shared by contemporary liberals. In connection with this, Samarin addressed the question of the boundaries in which Polish statehood could be restored and stated that time destroyed old historical conditions. Similarly Solov’ëv, against the ambitions of Poles to restore their empire, claimed that the old boundaries were no longer relevant in his time. 15. See Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration, 492. 16. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ 253. 17. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ 71–72. 18. Walicki, Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration, 149. 19. See, for example, Solov’ëv, ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ 62. 20. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Istoricheskii sfinks,’’ 485. 21. See Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism, (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992 [1967]), 171–74. 22. Globally he criticized the Slavophiles’ uncritical and unhistorical treatment of the Russian past. For a critical appraisal of Solov’ëv on these issues, see Pauline Schrooyen, ‘‘Vladimir S. Solov’ëv: Critic or Heir of Slavophilism,’’ in van den Bercken, de Courten, and van der Zweerde, Vladimir Solov’ëv, 13–27. 23. See Anatolii Koni, ‘‘Vestnik Evropy,’’ in Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1969), 7:220–59. Worth noticing in this respect is his assimi-

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Manon de Courten lating Solov’ëv to liberals. This also was the opinion of I. S. Durnovo in the conservative newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti (‘‘G. Solov’ëv v roli Pol’skogo patriota. Vos’moe ‘Pis’mo’ iz Peterburga,’’ Moskovskie vedomosti, no. 169 [June 22, 1893], 2). I. S. Durnovo, about whom no information could be found, should not be confused with his contemporary, Pëtr Nikolaevich Durnovo (1845–1915), head of the police department. 24. See Gakkebush, Ob avtonomii Pol’shi, 48 ff. 25. Pogodin, Glavnye techeniia pol’skoi politicheskoi mysli, 23, 32, 47. 26. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Grekhi Rossii,’’ 211; idem, ‘‘L’idée russe,’’ 96. 27. Nikolai Kareev, Polonica. Sbornik statei po pol’skim delam (1881–1905) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M.M. Stasiulevicha, 1905), 16–17; Solov’ëv: ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ 69. 28. Solov’ëv emphasized this in ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ ‘‘Grekhi Rossii,’’ and ‘‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Przegl˛ad Polski.’ ’’ 29. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ 252. 30. It is unclear whether Solov’ëv really believed in this option. He only mentioned it once and admitted that the purely political aspect of the question did not interest him very much, and that he did not believe in the future of independent states (‘‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Przegl˛ad Polski,’ ’’ 271). Interestingly Aleksei Khomiakov also had made this claim, going as far as calling for a plebiscite among the Poles. Solov’ëv’s call for a plebiscite in ‘‘Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala ‘Przegl˛ad Polski,’ ’’ was perhaps an unacknowledged echo of Khomiakov’s position. About the context of this publication, that is, Solov’ëv’s polemic with the Polish historian Stanis™aw Tarnowski, who in response to Solov’ëv’s call advocated reconciliation through the Russians’ conversion to Catholicism, see Lilianna Kiejzik, ‘‘The Polish Case in Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Vision of the Future,’’ Studies in East European Thought 55, no. 2 (2003): 141–55. 31. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ 252. 32. ‘‘For hostile and mistrustful speeches there is always ready material at hand; a couple of commonplaces about the historical character of the Polish szlachta and the Polish ksendzy [Catholic priests, MC]’’ (Kareev, Polonica, 2). Even though Solov’ëv did not intend to write hostile pieces on Poles, his approach is quite similar to those Polonophobes in the Russian press. 33. On Chicherin, see Rubakin, Sredi knig, 157; Gakkebush, Ob avtonomii Pol’shi, 49. 34. Significantly the same formulation of a liberal stance in religious terms on the Polish question can be found in the view of Solov’ëv’s father, the famous historian Sergei Solov’ëv. See J. L. Black, ‘‘Interpretations of Poland in Nineteenth-Century Russian Nationalist-Conservative Historiography,’’ Polish Review 17, no. 4 (autumn 1972): 20–41 (offprint, 19). 35. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Istoricheskii sfinks.’’ 36. Like Gringmut, Dmitrii Ilovaiskii had voiced strong disapproval of Solov’ëv’s above-mentioned lecture in 1891. They both wrote in response to Solov’ëv’s ‘‘Iz voprosov kul’tury.’’ Durnovo was very hostile to Solov’ëv, since Solov’ëv had quoted him as an example of the intolerance exhorted under the banner of the defense of Orthodoxy. 37. Dmitrii Ilovaiskii, ‘‘Antinatsional’nye i lezhekhristianskie teorii,’’ Moskovskie vedomosti, no. 157 (July 10, 1893): 2. Dmitrii Ilovaiskii (1832–1920) was a historian and publicist. No further contacts between Solov’ëv and Ilovaiskii have been identified. As to the fear of penetration and contamination of Russia by Polish elements, see the contribution to the present volume by Leonid Gorizontov.

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Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Views on the Polish Question 38. I. S. Durnovo, ‘‘G. Solov’ëv v roli Pol’skogo patriota,’’ 2. Durnovo defended the adoption of drastic measures concerning the repartition of land in the Polish territories, which implied the prohibition for Poles to buy, administer, or cultivate land in the Polish territories. See I. S. Durnovo, ‘‘Kolonizatsiia Rossii inostrantsami. Tret’e ‘Pis’mo’ iz Peterburga,’’ Moskovskie vedomosti, no. 121 (May 4, 1893): 2. 39. Arguably it is for the same reason that ‘‘L’idée russe’’ was condemned by the ober-prokuror of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev published a critique of the lecture in Moskovskie vedomosti (no. 271 [September 30, 1888]), and drew the attention of Alexander III to Solov’ëv, whose lecture testified to the ‘‘craziness’’ of its author. See K.P. Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty. Pis’ma i zapiski, vol. 1, part 2 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 828. 40. See Vladimir Gringmut, Sobranie statei V. A. Gringmuta, 1896–1907 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1908). Gringmut was one of Solov’ëv’s opponents in the polemic provoked by his 1891 lecture ‘‘On the Reasons for the Downfall of the Medieval Worldview.’’ 41. The most radical example is Solov’ëv’s criticism of Alexander III for not having forgiven the murderers of his father, Emperor Alexander II. See Manon de Courten, ‘‘The Prophet Intervenes: Solov’ëv’s Lectures after the Murder of Tsar Alexander II,’’ in van den Bercken, de Courten, and van der Zweerde, Vladimir Solov’ëv, 297–312. 42. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,’’ 252. 43. See also ibid., 250, where Solov’ëv stated, ‘‘The upper class was and is everything. Poland and the szlachta are one and the same thing.’’ As far as the peasants were concerned, it seems that they indeed remained passive for a long time and tried to avoid any conflicts with the Russian occupier. See Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49–50. 44. Solov’ëv, ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ 70. 45. W. F. Reddaway et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Poland: From Augustus II to Pilsudski (1697–1935) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), 390. 46. See Solov’ëv, ‘‘Pol’sha i vostochnyi vopros,’’ 70. This discrepancy between historically attested information and Solov’ëv’s interpretation again has to do with his exclusive focus on the intentions of the Russian state. He tends to characterize these intentions as good so long as they emanate from those Russian rulers whom he identifies as truly Christian rulers, that is, above all Peter the Great and Catherine II but also Alexander I and Alexander II. 47. Aleksander Gieysztor et al., Histoire de Pologne (Warsaw: Éditions scientifiques de Pologne, 1971), 574. 48. Ibid. 49. Characteristically the philosopher did not reflect on the possibility of solutions to the social antagonisms in Poland other than those that had occurred in the past. His approach to history consists in an acceptance of what has happened as a historical necessity, in the sense of conformity to God’s plan in history or Providence. Such an interpretation of history can be called theology of history. For a functional analysis of theology of history and of philosophy of history in Solov’ëv’s texts on the Polish question, see Manon de Courten, ‘‘Two Narratives on History in Vladimir Solov’ëv: The Polish Question,’’ in Solov’ëvskii sbornik. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii: V. S. Solov’ëv i ego filosofskoe nasledie 28–30 avgusta 2000 g., ed. I. V. Borisova and A. P. Kozyrev, eds., 475–86 (Moscow: Fenomenologiia-Germenevtika, 2001).

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eight

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Leonid Gorizontov

Russian-Polish confrontation can be analyzed in geopolitical categories. This type of analysis has already been attempted by the American scholar John LeDonne.1 The central concept in his study of empire is the core area of the nation-state. The space between neighboring cores—the frontier—which is the main arena for their confrontations, is not qualitatively uniform. The frontier is divided into three zones: the proximate, the intermediate, and the ultimate. The definitions are relative so that the ultimate zone of one is the proximate zone of the other. In this approach the overlapping peripheries become objects of study on a par with the cores. It is also useful to identify strategies that highlight aggressive and hidden-border policies applied by a state expanding its boundaries. The core areas to be discussed in this chapter are the Moscowcentered Russian Empire and the Warsaw-centered aspiring Polish state. While LeDonne is primarily concerned with analyzing intergovernmental confrontations, the focus of this study is the process that occurs in an imperial governmental organization that has already taken form. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject a geopolitical perspective in examining the western borderlands of Russia in the period from 1815 to 1915. The absence of 122

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation a Polish state was compensated for by a deeply rooted state tradition and the Poles’ bitter struggle for the restoration of state sovereignty, as well as by the closely associated process of the creation of the Polish nation. State traditions can be expressed in geopolitical terms not only by the example of Poland but also by the example of Russia. First, I need to clarify the configuration of the two cores. In the late eighteenth century the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) and the incorporation of the northern littoral of the Black Sea into the Russian Empire created qualitatively new geopolitical realities in Russia, and, as a result, Russians formed concepts of the interior provinces based on certain domestic traditions in which the center was Moscow.2 The idea that all the Eastern Slavs shared an ethno-historical unity and should therefore be reunited was connected with the mythical Kievan origins of the Russian state. While the symbols of Kievan unity remained relevant, by the nineteenth century the Moscow-centered idea had displaced this ancient notion. Moscow had now come to be perceived as the ‘‘core’’ of the Eastern Slavs. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the formation of firm conceptions of what made up the core, accompanied by descriptors such as ‘‘indigenous,’’ ‘‘central’’ Russia and the ‘‘interior gubernias.’’ Interior gubernias (provinces) was an officially recognized category, which, though not entirely clearly defined, was used as an administrative-territorial regional division of the empire. Interior Russia was conceived of as a circle with a radius of 450 versts.3 Occupying the most distant orbits around Moscow’s center of gravity we find Nizhnii Novgorod, Voronezh, Vologda, and, with certain reservations, Smolensk. According to Konstantin Arsen’ev, one of the most authoritative geographers of the first half of the nineteenth century, ‘‘interior European Russia includes the following gubernias: Iaroslavl’, Kostroma, Nizhnii Novgorod, Penza, Tambov, Voronezh, Kursk, Orlov, Kaluga, Tula, Moscow, Vladimir, and Riazan’.’’ Normally Tver’ gubernia and less often Smolensk gubernia were considered ‘‘interior’’ as well. The territory thus described did not cover the whole of Great Russia and comprised a special, functionally significant region of the empire, possessing its own historical, ethnic, geopolitical, environmental, and economic characteristics. Arsen’ev characterized the area as ‘‘the best of Russia, especially in the political-economic and administrative arenas.’’4 ‘‘The central or interior space,’’ according to Arsen’ev, was ‘‘the heart of the empire, the true basis of its greatness, the real homeland of the Russian people, the center of all European Russia, the receptacle of all its treasures, produced by its level of education, by its widespread industrial capacity and extensive domestic trade.’’ ‘‘The Russian lands,’’ he wrote, ‘‘show their similarities in the identical characteristics of their inhabitants, in the commonality of their language, in identical civil statutes, in a common religion, and in an almost identical level of education of the people living there, and these areas are the true fatherland of the Russians, the bastion or principal 123

The Russian and Polish cores and contested borderlands.

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The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation foundation of the Russian government. This is the great circle, to which all the other parts of the empire are joined like radials extending in various directions, some closer, some farther away, contributing in greater or lesser degrees to its indivisibility.’’5 The Russian style of landed estate ownership was a distinctive marker of the borders of the ‘‘interior gubernias’’ to the west. The interior gubernias were perceived as the standard and primary foundation for the Russification of the rest of the empire. The idea of an independent Ukrainian or even Belorussian nation was often compared to the prospect of self-determination for one of the individual regions of interior Russia so as to underscore its obvious impossibility. According to F. V. Bulgarin, the Little Russians (Ukrainians) and the Belorussians were ‘‘exactly the same Russians as residents of the Moscow, Vladimir, Kaluga, Riazan’, and other such Great-Russian gubernias.’’6 The configuration and construction of the imperial core was complicated by the fact that there was a second capital center outside its boundaries, located in St. Petersburg, which had its own gravitational field that, to some extent, overlapped Moscow’s. As is well known, the competition between the two Russian capitals for the intellectual leadership left clearly visible tracks in Russian cultural history and social thought, which continues to this day. The Polish core was qualitatively different from the Russian core as a result of the Poles’ loss of their own nation state and the partition of a political space that had once been united. The new international political borders, overlaid on the regional structure that had taken form previously, were conducive to the disintegration of the territorial integrity of the Polish Commonwealth. In the context of Polish history, the Kingdom of Poland created with the sanction of the Congress of Vienna was an artificial and rather nonhomogeneous territorial construct. It included Mazowia in the central Vistula, parts of Great and Little Poland in the center and southeast of Warsaw, Polesie in the eastern marshes, parts of ethnographic Lithuania, and the territory (oblast’) of the ancient towns on the upper Western Bug River known as the Cherven cities.7 Thus, in addition to the crown lands, the Kingdom also included lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and a number of non-Polish enclaves along its eastern borders, which followed the Nieman and Western Bug rivers. The inclusion of Mazowia, with its characteristically large number of gentry, and Warsaw, the capital of the Polish Commonwealth, played a decisive role in determining the general look of the Kingdom. Even after the partitions Warsaw retained the aura of a capital city that it had acquired as a result of the formation of the Polish Commonwealth. It grew to almost a million inhabitants on the eve of World War I, occupying third place in the Russian Empire in terms of population after St. Petersburg and Moscow. It demonstrated a unique potential among all the Polish regions for assimilation in the nineteenth century.8 Its political and cultural voice was important for all the former lands of the Polish Commonwealth, and for the Russian portion (zabór rosyjski) in particular. ‘‘Warsaw had different faces,’’ writes 125

Leonid Gorizontov Stefan Kieniewicz, ‘‘when viewed from Galicia, Poznan, ´ or the eastern borderlands.’’9 Its competition with the ancient Polish capital of Kraków, which ended up in the Hapsburg empire, is to some extent analogous to the relationship between St. Petersburg and Moscow, if lacking its scale and scope even in the period when the ‘‘Polish Piemonte’’ was being formed in Galicia. Kraków was not the administrative center of the province and was much smaller than L’vov-Lemberg, which was located in the multiethnic region of the province and occupied the center of the ‘‘Ukrainian Piemonte.’’ At the same time both Warsaw and Moscow were simultaneously capitals and not capitals. In the Russian case, St. Petersburg was the new imperial capital, and, in the Polish case, there was no state of which a city could be named the capital. For a long time the administrative system of the Kingdom of Poland maintained features characteristic of a surrogate state.10 The Kingdom of Poland was the unquestionable leader of the struggle for national liberation and of the economic development within the borders of the Polish Commonwealth. It was also the most economically autonomous region of Poland and the one with the largest concentration of Poles.11 At the same time, in addition to the Poles, members of other nationalities were living in the Kingdom. Especially numerous in this respect were the Jews, who, just before World War I, comprised as much as 40 percent of Warsaw’s inhabitants. The role of the Kingdom of Poland was clearly recognized by both the Russians and the Poles. On the eve of the uprising of 1830–31, Iosif Semashko reported to the director in chief of Spiritual Affairs for Foreign Confessions, Dmitrii Bludov, that the Poles were dreaming that ‘‘the eight Russian gubernias [at that time, Kovno,12 the ninth western gubernia, had not yet been formed.—LG] would somehow become colonies of the little Kingdom of Poland.’’ Exactly thirty years later he warned Alexander II of the predators hiding on the banks of the Vistula River. ‘‘At this point the Kingdom of Poland seems less important for Russia,’’ wrote Semashko, sharing his concerns, ‘‘than its influence on the western gubernias, and perhaps even farther. It has sunk its claws deep into them, and is hindering the unification of these gubernias with like-blooded Russia.’’13 Although Warsaw is mentally closer to the Russians than Kraków, the Kingdom of Poland remained a sort of domestic foreign land. In the early 1830s, Petr Chaadaev could see the possibility of ‘‘the dissolution of the present Kingdom in order to turn it into the core of an independent Poland.’’14 ‘‘The Kingdom of Poland,’’ wrote Ivan Aksakov, ‘‘to this very day does not behave toward Russia as a province does toward a metropolis, or like the periphery to the center, but as one organism to another, one people to another, because it includes within itself a special, complete, independent national organism, stamped with its own national identity, living and acting independently and in its own name in history. These two organisms can hardly become one as long as they are possessed of such sharply differing internal qualities. Moscow cannot become the center for Poland any more than . . . Warsaw 126

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation can for Russia. The relationship between the Western Region and central Russia are completely different.’’ In Aksakov’s estimation, central Russia was not equated with Great Russia: ‘‘Tula and Kaluga by themselves are rather faceless and their domestic life shows no great diversity. Compared to that, Moscow and St. Petersburg are qualitatively and characteristically different.’’15 In 1865, A. F. Hilferding, born in a Warsaw engulfed in an uprising, wrote that in the western borderlands ‘‘the upper classes belong to the nationalities’’ who ‘‘have had and want to have their own center outside Russia (like the Poles in Lithuania). Therefore the upper classes comprise a centrifugal force and, even when they feel loyalty to the state, cannot sympathize with the growth and development of the Russian national center, since any flow of power toward this national center must increase its gravitational field.’’16 For Hilferding, the Polish ‘‘center outside Russia’’ was the Kingdom of Poland. According to a much later, one might say final, evaluation by Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Sazonov, ‘‘instead of the previous, natural border,’’ the unification of Poland with the Russian tsardom ‘‘produced a disfigured one. . . . A Poland implacably hostile to Russia was incorporated into it [Russia] and considerably weakened it politically, taking on the role of a tumor or hernia in what was the previously healthy organism of the Russian state.’’17 At the same time that Semashko wrote Alexander II, the ‘‘picture of the world’’ seen through the Polish lens had a different tint to it. ‘‘Warsaw is an interesting phenomenon with regard to the country that surrounds it,’’ wrote a resident of the South-Western Region (western Ukraine). ‘‘According to the elementary laws of physics, the rays of the closest light source are the strongest. Therefore, if we consider Warsaw as such a source, then our provinces should be at the outer limits of the attenuation of its rays, and should be warmed least of all by its heat. . . . In reality, however, we see a completely different picture. It seems that we love Warsaw more and that, in return, it directs hotter rays at us than would normally be expected.’’ But it was not always like that. The author of the excerpt above stated that Warsaw reestablished its importance with regard to Ukraine only after the customs border with the Kingdom of Poland was abolished in the middle of the century. It was not long ago that ‘‘those seeking entertainment went to Odessa, those going shopping went to Berdichev and Kiev, and for the literati . . . ‘Tygodnik Peterburski.’ The Bug River kept us apart almost like the Great Wall of China.’’18 The desire for an autonomous Kingdom of Poland was the main political goal of the Poles who were ready to cooperate with the powers that be. This desire returned with renewed vigor at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘‘Owing to its position at the center of the Polish lands, between the Prussian and the Austrian partitions, on the one hand, and the vast annexed regions, on the other . . ., thanks to the fact that it contains the largest Polish center— Warsaw—[the Kingdom] is destined to take the lead in Poland, and on its fate and position to a considerable degree hangs the fate of the whole of Poland,’’ reasoned the leader of the National Democrats, Roman Dmowski.19 127

Leonid Gorizontov These statements make clear that the Kingdom of Poland (with the exception of its eastern borderlands) lay solidly within the gravitational field of Warsaw. It is worth noting that there was no such other powerful nationstate core within the Russian Empire capable of competing with the Russian nation-state core. In addition to the consequences of the partition for the ethnically Polish lands (a phenomenon of divided nations), a qualitative difference between the Polish and the Russian cores is their ethnic heterogeneity, clearly manifested by gaps in the ethnic composition of the social strata. For most of the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, the gaps were caused by a lack of national nobility. But in the case of Poland, while the nobility formed a very numerous class, the merchant, crafts, and urban strata were filled with non-Polish peoples. Furthermore, the formation of the national consciousness of the Polish peasantry had its own peculiarities. The construction of the peripheries located between the Russian and Polish cores was determined by historical developments and the peculiarities of the ethnic makeup of the populace. The most important role in this regard belonged to the border of 1772. That border owes its stability to the conclusion of the ‘‘Eternal Peace’’ of 1686 that ended a long series of wars between Russia and Poland. The 1772 border had thus been in existence since the middle of the seventeenth century. The Eternal Peace was worthy of its name because the border that it established not only existed for almost 90 years as the boundary between two states but maintained its significance as an ‘‘invisible’’ border for almost another 150 years after the liquidation of the Polish Commonwealth. For a long time Poland was perceived in the Russian public consciousness as being defined by the border of 1772. ‘‘My ignorance,’’ wrote Filipp Vigel’, ‘‘which, by the way, was shared by all the residents of interior Russia, made me think that everything that was outside our old border is and always had been the real Poland.’’20 O. Avejde, under arrest for participating in the uprising of 1863–64, drew the attention of the authorities to certain unsettled questions: ‘‘Should there be some sort of Polish fatherland independent of, but not separated from, the Russian fatherland? Should all the provinces of the previous Poland that are now ruled by Russia be considered a part of Poland, or only the Kingdom of Poland? What should the relationship be between these provinces, and between each of them and the state as a whole?’’ According to Avejde, it is because of a lack of answers to these questions that ‘‘our domestic policies consisted of a mixture of both new and old concepts and initiatives.’’21 There were de-Polonized, Russian-Orthodox territories between the interior gubernias and the Western Region across the Dnepr River that had been transferred from the Polish Commonwealth to Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century. Together with these, the Left Bank of Little Russia (the former Hetmanate) and the Smolensk Region with its Belorussian estates also retained traces of their former possession by the Polish-Lithuanian state. 128

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation In my estimation, the Smolensk Region is closer to interior Russia than is Little Russia and plays a comparatively less important role in the context of Russian-Polish conflict in the nineteenth century. Grigorii Potemkin, who came from these parts, was nevertheless able to call himself a Pole, and his countryman, Sergei Glinka, could write that ‘‘Smolensk is brought closer to Catherine by the Tauridian Prince [Potemkin].’’22 It is quite interesting that Smolensk was not always considered one of the interior provinces. Just as on the Left Bank of the Dnepr in Little Russia, the prospect of re-Polonization of the Smolensk Region should have worried the authorities. Andreas Kappeler, in his book about the Russian Empire, was right to draw special attention to the Smolensk Region. If one relegates Little Russia and Smolensk to the proximate frontier (looking at it from the Russian core), then one also has to discuss its second echelon, represented primarily by the Belorussian gubernias of Mogilev and, to a significant extent, Vitebsk, as well as the gubernia of Kiev. The border of 1772 was not only the dividing line prior to the partition but was also the new demarcation line between Russia and the Polish Commonwealth, established as a result of the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian state. This similar but new border (because of the altered political conditions), which was very much ‘‘visible’’ for two decades, would be of considerable significance to the fate of the populace that it divided and to St. Petersburg’s strategies. It is therefore appropriate to speak of the borders of 1772 (plural), distinguishing between the old and the new. At the end of the eighteenth century, Kiev and a small amount of surrounding land that had been a part of Russia for almost 150 years became a part of the Western Region, forming the gubernia of Kiev, together with lands taken once more from the Polish Commonwealth. The less Polonized eastern Belorussia, which had become a part of the empire two decades earlier, and the gubernia of Kiev, which was made up of two parts, seemed more prepared for rapid integration than the other zones of the Western Region. Even before the uprising of 1830–31, when the expansion of the Kingdom of Poland eastward was still a possibility, Stefan Kieniewicz has detected a harsher policy on the part of the authorities with regard to the Poles in the gubernias of Vitebsk, Mogilev, and Kiev than was seen in the other sectors of the ‘‘annexed lands,’’ ‘‘as if only the western part of these lands had an intention to join with Poland.’’23 On the eve of the uprising of 1863–64 officials recognized that ‘‘the Polish element in the gubernia of Kiev is somewhat weaker than in the gubernias of Podolsk and Volynsk.’’24 Now let us look at the other side of the frontier. The proximate zone of the frontier of the Polish core (the ultimate of the Russian core) is composed of the eastern edge of the Kingdom of Poland (the Kholm district, part of Augustus gubernia), a considerable part of the North-Western Region, and the comparatively smaller South-Western Region. The Belorussian and Lithuanian villages along a line drawn from Bia™ystok to Vil’no had been Polonized. 25 In 129

Leonid Gorizontov the North-Western Region, there were sizable ethnically Lithuanian and confessionally Catholic lands where the Polish population was represented primarily by the gentry. Even though a regional consciousness expressed as opposition by Lithuanian royalists played a very significant role, the western part of historical Lithuania, ‘‘the lesser motherland’’ of Adam Mickiewicz and Józef Pi™sudski, felt its ties to Poland (and vice versa) to a greater extent than did the Right Bank Ukraine.26 The ultimate Russian zone, with certain exceptions, was also composed of Galicia (Eastern Galicia), which was a part of the Hapsburg empire. One should again point out the lack of regional homogeneity and the varied layers of the zone. The strip of land between the Russian and Polish proximate zones constitutes the mutual Russian-Polish intermediate frontier zone, which is characterized by a transition of features from those of a proximate zone to those of an ultimate zone. It is precisely these two geopolitical categories that offer the greatest contrast and, together with the cores, form the primary subject of the remainder of this essay. This classification, despite its theoretical character, is not speculative. It corresponds to a ranking of the western gubernias on the basis of the problems they posed for the authorities (from the point of view of the integrative policies of the center) and for the Polish nationalist movement (from the point of view of the potential for resistance). Andreas Kappeler sketches a zonal conception similar to the one used here.27 Having defined the main foundations in terms of objective geopolitical parameters of the Russian-Polish conflict, I turn now to the political strategies used by the two sides, and primarily to the political line followed by the imperial government. The shifting public perception of the geopolitical realities—borders and regions—provided more than enough material for political projects and ideological constructions of both an offensive and defensive character. However, this delineation is relative, as an offensive strategy is often used as a form of defense. The course steered by the government exhibited differing features in the Polish core and in the proximate and ultimate zones of the frontier. The policy applied to the area of Russian colonization in the western borderlands can be used, in particular, as an accurate barometer of these regional characteristics and of the recognition of the necessity of a differentiated approach.28 Left-Bank Ukraine was seen as both an offensive and defensive beachhead in the conflict with the Poles. The idea of using the Little-Russian Cossacks against the Polish Commonwealth surfaced in Grigorii Potemkin’s time.29 After the final liquidation of the Polish Commonwealth, Little Russia was seen as a defensive wall, capable of becoming a factor in holding back the Poles. This was connected with plans of resurrecting the Cossack order. In 1831, St. Petersburg called on the Little-Russian Military Governor N. G. Repnin to play the regional anti-Polish card. Writing about the inhabitants of the region under his care, this prominent administrator explained: ‘‘[The 130

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation Cossacks’] hereditary hatred of the neighboring Catholic Polaks makes them the best security against Polish foolishness for at least another century.’’ Were they to trust the Cossacks, Repnin promised ‘‘this military nation would stand guard at the Dnepr against Polish gullibility.’’ In forming the Cossack regiments, he addressed himself directly to the ‘‘best guards.’’ ‘‘The faithful Cossacks’’ (a concept already cultivated by Potemkin) were called upon ‘‘to guard the motherland of their blood, the land and homes of their parents, wives and children from the mutinous Poles, faithless and ungrateful traitors, the spawn of those same Polaks, who had once wanted to destroy the holy faith of your brave ancestors, and take away their property, but who were defeated by your forefathers.’’ It is interesting to note that even before the Polish uprising Nicholas I had viewed the line formed by the Dnepr and Dvina rivers as a defensive position. Speaking of the eradication of bootlegging on the Left Bank—a significant problem in the region—he used the example of Great Russia, saying, ‘‘It will be easier . . . to stop it at the border along the Dnepr and Dvina.’’30 When, in 1835, the more Russified gubernia of Khar’kov (the former Sloboda Ukraine) was combined with the Poltava and Chernigov gubernias into one general-governorship, it was only with reference to the latter two that Little-Russian names continued to be used, underscoring that the newly formed territorial-administrative unit had some common elements and some differences. One of the differences was an attitude toward Poland that accorded with a number of historical traditions. The formation of Little-Russian Cossack regiments was resumed in 1863, but by June officials had already begun to discuss stopping it because of its possible connection with an active Ukrainophilia31 that was seen as ‘‘Polish intrigue.’’ At the same time the authorities tried to give an anti-Polish impetus to Ukrainophilia. Russian authorities made use of Ukrainians in the Kingdom of Poland along with the Russophile Galicians. It is interesting to note that within Ukrainophile circles a distinction was made between people of ‘‘Polish stock,’’ who had come from the Right Bank, and ‘‘Left-Bankers of pure LittleRussian stock,’’ ‘‘true descendants of the Cossacks.’’32 No less symptomatic was the unification of the two western (Belorussian) gubernias of Vitebsk and Mogilev with Smolensk gubernia into one generalgovernorship, despite the fact that the problems they presented were not always similar. A curious example of the lengths to which people were prepared to go in an effort to underscore the high degree of integration of eastern Belorussia is a tsarist directive from the early 1830s, announcing that ‘‘the gubernias of Vitebsk and Mogilev are not to be considered as among those being returned from Poland.’’33 The directive added, somewhat later, a prohibition on calling them ‘‘Belorussian’’ gubernias (an analogous prohibition was applied to naming the ‘‘Lithuanian gubernias’’ but did not mention the Little-Russian gubernias). In this fashion the old border of 1772 was changed to the new one. ‘‘Vitebsk gubernia is one of those rather easy gubernias,’’ stated Egor 131

Leonid Gorizontov Kankrin, the very experienced minister of finance, at the end of the 1830s.34 This conclusion had nothing to do with his ministry, because the Vitebsk and Mogilev gubernias had required government subsidies for a number of years by that time. In 1852, the minister of internal affairs, Dmitrii Bibikov, opposed extending measures applied in the western gubernias to Mogilev and Vitebsk gubernias, because they had ‘‘always been peaceful’’ and these measures might ‘‘upset’’ them. This decisive recent governor-general of Right-Bank Ukraine apparently did not consider Mogilev and Vitebsk to be part of the group of western gubernias.35 In early 1856, Bibikov’s successor, Sergei Lanskoi, who rejected the usefulness of combining gubernias ‘‘that were already properly organized, and which did not include any divergent elements’’ into general-governorships targeted in particular the general-governorships centered in Khar’kov and Vitebsk. He informed the monarch that ‘‘daily experience proves that direction by the governor-general not only is not useful there but, to the contrary, forms another unnecessary administrative layer that only serves to slow things down and make them more difficult.’’36 Lanskoi’s criticisms had immediate effect. That very same day a tsarist directive was issued abolishing both generalgovernorships, and the usefulness of the very institution of general-governors long remained on the agenda of Alexander II and his entourage. In view of these observations, it is not difficult to understand why it came as a complete surprise to the authorities when the gentry of Rogachev (the city of Rogachev on the upper reaches of the Dnepr is separated from the Kingdom by several hundred versts) submitted a petition to include Mogilev gubernia in the Kingdom of Poland, and again when rebels appeared in April 1863 in another district capital in the same gubernia (Gorki), just two dozen versts from the border of Smolensk gubernia. The second event evoked ‘‘a fearful panic about the Poles’’ in Smolensk, whose inhabitants were reminded of their position near the border, and even in Moscow. 37 The Vitebsk and Mogilev gubernias fell under the jurisdiction of M. N. Murav’ev, who at that time held an appointment as the governor-general of the North-Western Region. Later, however, a special—favorable—relationship with them was reestablished. The opposite side of the frontier (from the authorities’ point of view) experienced an increasing number of difficulties. As Egor Kankrin expressed it, ‘‘the Vil’no gubernia is a rather difficult one.’’ In this gubernia ‘‘the north-western . . . districts (Samogitiia or Zhmud’) are different from the others and form a sort of separate whole. They have their own special way of life, their own dialect and customs that have taken root among the inhabitants over time and are more respected by them than positive laws.’’38 Kovno gubernia, which was formed in 1842 out of the same area of Vil’no gubernia, became the most problematic of the whole Western Region. It appears, then, that areas of the North-Western Region can be arranged in order of their descending ‘‘difficulty’’ for the authorities, for example, Kovno, Vil’no, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev gubernias. In the South-West Region, Volynsk was considered the most difficult 132

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation gubernia to manage, and Kiev gubernia, as has already been noted, was considered comparatively ‘‘easy.’’ From the point of view of the Polish nationalliberation movement, the order was reversed. The Western Region of the Russian Empire—the area under study—is unique in that it was perceived to be both a borderland and a field across which either the Russian or the Polish core would very likely be expanded.39 Its centrality was defined by the absolute numerical majority of Russian-Orthodox Eastern Slavs among the populace and a longstanding tradition of statehood. Its peripheral nature was defined by the enormous influence of heterogeneous elements (Poles, Jews) and the weakness of the Russian system of landed estates, as well as by the ethnic peculiarities of the Eastern Slav populace itself, which had developed attitudes hostile to central control and associated with ties among members of ethnic groups split by the state border. During the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, as challenges to state unity came to be perceived as a real danger, the stabilization of the empire became more and more associated with the expansion of its core. Moving the latter in a westerly direction made the question of the further expansion of state territory at the expense of Austrian Eastern Galicia a real issue. The prospect of establishing a west-Russian region within a borderland hostile to the center was categorically contrary to the preservation of the empire. Hence the idea of ‘‘gathering together the Russian lands’’ and ‘‘uniting them,’’ which initially had served as the basis of Russian Reconquista, became the recipe for the survival of the imperial state. The recipe had its foreign policy component, because continued external expansion was seen as a necessary condition of the internal stability of the empire. This then raises the question of what the mechanism was for the dual expansion of the Russian Empire. After the uprising of 1863, a more active Russian policy in the ultimate zone becomes noticeable. The Poles of the Kingdom, who saw the next partition in the separation of the Kholm region from the Kingdom, became more active. The Ukrainian movement, on the other hand, welcomed this step, without, however, supporting the government’s plans for Russification. It was precisely here that the Uniate religious spirit was maintained the longest (until 1875). There were numerous people who could be characterized as ‘‘obstinate’’ ex-Uniates, and the shift to Catholicism following the change in the law on religious tolerance in April 1905 took place on a massive scale. The map compiled by V. A. Frantsev after the first Russian Revolution, according to testimony by the Russian-Orthodox archbishop Evlogii, ‘‘clearly demonstrated that the wave of Polonization and Catholicization was moving from west to east, capturing more and more new lands. Thirty to forty years ago, the border was considerably farther to the west.’’40 Characterizing this same time, the Polish priest T. Ostoja wrote that, ‘‘before the wave of Russification coming from the east reaches the Vistula, it will have to wash over Lithuania and Belorussia.’’41 In the interest of fairness it should be said that the Kholm gubernia, 133

Leonid Gorizontov formed in 1912, did include a number of lands in which the Eastern Slavic members of the population were in the minority. The gubernia was subordinated to the Kiev General-Governorship, which placed it in the same group as the south-western gubernias. Just as in the case of Kholm, it was suggested that segregation along nationality lines be a principle used in the creation of administrative divisions in Galicia, which was occupied by Russian troops during World War I. Lands with a preponderance of East Slavic (the jargon for ‘‘Russian’’ at the time) population formed the General-Governorship of Galicia, while the ethnically Polish territories of Western Galicia, in accordance with the declared course of gathering all the Polish lands within the Russian Empire, were to be joined with the Kingdom of Poland.42 In other words, domestic and foreign policy interests in the western borders prompted on the eve of the empire’s collapse a stronger demand for highlighting ethnic borders with administrative-territorial divisions than for ‘‘erasing’’ them. Having very considerable (but not unlimited) resources for applying force to regulate the mutual relationship between the two cores, the government undertook efforts both to destroy the Polish core from within and to pull away its proximate zones while at the same time expanding the Russian core at the expense of the Polish core’s proximate zone. Pursuing these goals, officials placed their hopes on redrawing administrative boundaries and centers, and thereby securing a rather free-form redistricting of the frontier zones so that the more problematic zones would lose territory as a result of having been swallowed up by less problematic zones. In 1838, Dmitrii Bludov, the minister of internal affairs, initiated the largest project of this kind in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, one that encompassed the greater portion of European Russia. Although during interdepartmental discussions of his proposals the western gubernias were recognized as the most difficult target of the reforms, they were quickly moved to the fore. ‘‘With regards to the western gubernias,’’ wrote Bludov, ‘‘I find changes to them necessary for reasons that stem not so much from their topographic location as from their political relations with the imperial government and with its indigenous inhabitants.’’43 Bludov was hoping to use his reforms ‘‘so far as possible, to speed up the process of bringing the inhabitants of the west closer to the center of the empire, and weakening such feelings of estrangement as have recently surfaced to the mutual detriment of both Russia’s sons by birth and its adopted confessionally different members of the same tribe.’’44 Bludov’s colleagues on the Committee of Ministers found a number of obstacles to implementing the reforms. ‘‘In certain respects,’’ the officials pointed out, ‘‘some of these gubernias have such different characters that it is awkward to join a part of one to the main body of another. Because of the Cossacks, for example, the Little-Russian gubernias are so different from the others, like Kiev gubernia, that the combination of such differing, sometimes hostile areas cannot lead to good governance.’’45 In the end, the ‘‘cost of the 134

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation question’’ turned out to be too high, and the government limited itself in the first half of the 1840s to partial changes. The government returned to projects to reexamine the borders in the early 1850s, but work on them was quickly halted as a result of the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I. The next occasion to consider the borders of the western gubernias came in the fall of 1862. This was prompted by petitions from the nobility of the gubernias of Podolsk and Minsk, asking that these gubernias be administratively joined to the Kingdom of Poland.46 In the 1860s, calls were increasingly heard for activating the anti-Polish potential of the Ostsee Region (the Baltic provinces), which until this time had not been involved with problems of the western gubernias. Their involvement was made possible by a decision about the ‘‘suitability’’ of using Baltic Germans in the struggle against Polish nationalism. A number of projects now incorporated parts of the western gubernias into the Ostsee gubernias. At the same time, however, high government officials were becoming more and more irritated by the exceptional status of these same Baltic gubernias and their perilous ties to the German world. In two articles published in the newspaper Den’ in 1863 and 1867 Ivan Aksakov proposed an idea for a large-scale offensive plan on a parallel with those worked out by the government. The Slavophile publicist wrote pointedly of the need to ‘‘erase’’ the historical border that bore the stamp of RussianPolish antagonism, the memory of which was being kept alive by its use as an administrative-territorial demarcation line. ‘‘The main thing is to remove and erase the ancient boundaries that have kept our western gubernias to this day involuntarily separated from Russia by being labeled as regions. The old border, which divided Russia from the lands of the Polish Commonwealth until 1772 . . . must be destroyed. No trace of it should remain.’’47 Thirty years of discussions, minimally, and countless ‘‘calls’’ to action had not produced any serious, practical results. The border of 1772 remained necessary to the conduct of anti-Polish policy and was even strengthened in support of this goal. The abolition of a number of general-governorships in the 1870s was a direct continuation of the action once undertaken by Sergei Lanskoi. An article in the newspaper Deiatel’nost’ in 1870 expressed an opinion that enjoyed support in the upper reaches of government: ‘‘We do not think,’’ the article stated, ‘‘that the amalgamation of gubernias . . . into separate groupings that constantly recall their significance as unified wholes could be very conducive to the elimination of empty hopes.’’48 The general-governorships centered in Warsaw, Vil’no, and Kiev, however, demonstrated considerable stability. Another action that was, in a certain sense, the opposite of ‘‘erasing’’ the borders proved equally unsuccessful. In 1868, after an impossibly long discussion of the system under which residents of the Kingdom of Poland would be registered in Russia, and vice versa, a decision was taken forbidding Poles from the Kingdom to settle not only in the Western Region but also in the gubernias 135

Leonid Gorizontov that bordered them. There were eight of them: two Ostsee, two Little-Russian, one New-Russian, the Territory of Bessarabia, and the gubernias of Smolensk and Pskov.49 The ‘‘sanitary zone’’ that this defined stretched to the boundaries of the two capital-city gubernias: Moscow and St. Petersburg. The territories Ivan Aksakov had considered to be the base for offensive operations were what the statute of 1868 tried to cordon off from Polish expansion. This arrangement remained in effect until the beginning of the twentieth century. Similar measures to stem the influx of Poles from the Kingdom were also taken after the establishment of the gubernia of Kholm. A geopolitical reading of the content of the statute of 1868 reveals an intention to hinder what officials saw as the tendency of the Polish core to strengthen its position in the frontier and expand its ultimate zone. The measures taken clearly testify that it was none other than the Kingdom of Poland that was viewed as the Polish core, the chief resource for Polish expansion. At the same time Polish exiles who had been freed in an amnesty were forbidden to return to the Western Region, while they were allowed to settle both in the Kingdom of Poland and outside the boundaries of the former lands of the Polish Commonwealth. The harsh anti-Polish regimen in the western gubernias pushed many of the Poles living there in the same easterly direction. As a result, the Polish population began to build up in the ‘‘sanitary zone,’’ producing, from the government’s point of view, highly undesirable expansion of the ultimate Polish zone to the east. In the mid-1880s, Konstantin Pobedonostsev drew the tsar’s attention to the Polonization of the borderlands of Courland and Smolensk gubernias, made worse by the fact that his observations showed that the Poles had reached a consensus with the German nobility in Courland. ‘‘Polish colonization . . . is taking place in the Smolensk gubernia, and it is obvious that the Poles are acting systematically. . . . We did not think to put up barriers to them to the Smolensk borderlands, which have long been russified,’’ wrote Pobedonostsev.50 ‘‘Another question,’’ pondered the chairman of the Committee of Ministers, Nikolai Bunge, ‘‘aren’t the Polish landowners in the western gubernias who lost land being compensated, to a large extent, by their acquisition of real estate in Kherson, Bessarabia, and other gubernias that border on the western gubernias?’’51 This process had been attested in the latter third of the nineteenth century along the entire border of 1772. The influx of the Polish population was observed in many parts of the empire, even including interior Russia, where it was perceived as especially distressing. If this phenomenon had been welcomed under Nicholas I as a corrective measure, a way of dissolving the Poles ‘‘in a Russian sea,’’ it later began to raise serious concerns. The increase in migration took place against a background of increasing economic competition between Poland and Russia, the most striking episode of which became known as the ‘‘war between Moscow and Lodz’’ in the 1880s. When Russians proposed preventive measures, these often took on an aggressive nationalistic tint and were 136

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation accompanied by increased xenophobia. People spoke of the ‘‘impoverishment of the [Russian] center.’’ The appearance of the new concept of the ‘‘impoverishment of the center’’ in the 1880s and 1890s reflected a growing sense of discomfort about the condition of the Russian core. The reason for this phenomenon, which contemporaries discerned in a number of spheres of life, was often thought to be interregional relationships that were unfavorable to the center. The blame was assigned to foreigners, including the Poles. In the late 1890s, L. Volkov, in a direct continuance of Mikhail Katkov’s anti-Polish publicist line, wrote in this regard that ‘‘the lands along the Vistula are living and prospering at the expense of indigenous Russia. . . . The successes of industrial development along the Vistula are enriching—primarily at the expense of the indigenous Russian center—an element that is not only not Russian but one that is hostile to everything Russian.’’ The area along the Vistula was, in Volkov’s eyes, ‘‘an operational base and arsenal [of logistical and human resources—L.G.].’’ He made statements about ‘‘Polish pressure on the indigenous Russian lands.’’ ‘‘The government is spending much more on the lands along the Vistula than on indigenous Russian lands. . . . Departmental officials of Polish heritage in St. Petersburg know how to slow down the implementation of projects that would be beneficial to indigenous Russian lands, and to bring forward plans that are profitable for the lands along the Vistula and the Polish gentry of the western gubernias.’’52 Volkov was seconded by a publicist in the journal Novoe vremia, who noted that, ‘‘arriving in indigenous Russia, the Poles become serious competitors of the Russians, who have to construct a path for themselves in between the Germans, Jews and Armenians, and others.’’ The situation had developed in a way that caused educated Russians to feel that ‘‘they were under a state of siege in their own home.’’53 Polish expansion, however, occurred in a number of spheres associated with modernization, in which preventive tactics and ethnic discrimination were least effective, if not impossible. The fear of the expansion of secessionist attitudes in the borderlands was smaller than the concerns about the destructive action of centripetal, essentially integrationist forces: action that was being initiated not at the center but in the periphery. Russian society and the imperial government also reacted strongly to Polish defensive strategies based on national solidarity, such as organic work, the sacralization of the land in the course of the struggle for the preservation of Polish landownership,54 and ignoring everything Russian as well as the Russians themselves, who were construed as being ‘‘absent’’ (nieobecni). Beginning with the 1860s, the goal of destroying the Polish core began to crystallize in Russian policy. It was related to the peasant and Jewish questions, and included the idea of Russian colonization. The conceptual basis for such geopolitical calculations was not only the triune doctrine of the unity of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarussia but also the growing conviction of the 137

Leonid Gorizontov harmful nature of the Polish core. In this view an unbridgeable (even ethnodifferentiating) estrangement supposedly obtained between the peasantry and the gentry of the Kingdom of Poland. In addition, the integrity of the Polish gentry was thought to be compromised by the existence in the Kingdom of a considerable number of Jews. In the eyes of the Russians this view helped to legitimize Russian hegemony over central Poland. The explicitly anti-gentry Polish policy that formed in the wake of the uprising of 1863 was at that time clearly out of step with the government’s general policy of cooperating with local nobilities. But in the context of the later doctrine of popular monarchy, this dissonance came to be felt less strongly. Moreover, the experience of the 1860s was very important for the genesis of the doctrine of popular monarchy. Direct contact between the tsar and the people, bypassing the intermediaries (sredostenie) of educated society (including civil servants), raised the people, first and foremost the peasantry, to new heights. 55 This primarily affected the Russian peasantry but was not without its effects on the peasantry of the other peoples of the empire. If during the first half of the century the lack of a national nobility put a particular ethnic group in a second-class position, 56 and enabled a ‘‘landless’’ nobility (like the Baltic barons) to occupy a high place in the imperial hierarchy, then by the end of the century opinions about peasant nations had undergone a change, and the detachment of a nobility from the land came to be viewed as a sign of a group in decline. The reform of the empire was another major problem that had a geopolitical aspect. The imperial government was trying to bring the annexed territories into conformity with the administration of the central state. Doing so immediately, however, was impossible for a number of reasons. Egor Kankrin insisted that these new possessions be placed under special administration for a time so that they would not harm the economy of the other parts of the empire.57 Another obstacle was the complexity of unification in the face of the realities of the legal system at the local level, an obstacle that became especially clear when attempts at reform were made. Not surprisingly, during preparations for the peasant reforms in the late 1850s and early 1860s, V. Zaleskii observed that ‘‘the old borders of Poland reappeared again.’’58 The preservation of traditional institutions and privileges of the local nobility was an important characteristic of the expansion of the empire. In the Polish case, however, the mass participation of the Polish gentry in antigovernment actions caused a departure from the rules. In this connection the government found the western borderlands a unique field for experimentation with social and economic reforms. Often local experiments merely increased regional peculiarities.59 In turn, the sluggish pace of reform in the Russian core itself, as was the case, for example, during the long reign of Nicholas I, did not facilitate the incorporation of the borderlands.60 The very same Polish rebelliousness led to policies that were based on national (and simultaneously regional) delimitations. In the era of the Great 138

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation Reforms the separatist attitude of the Poles raised concerns that they would use the liberal institutions for the realization of their centrifugal objectives. The government therefore concentrated first on reforming the interior of Russia and the neighboring regions most integrated with it. The problem of the relationship between the reformed and unreformed parts of the state was accordingly altered and became more acute. In one way or another, while striving in principle for the creation of a homogeneous empire, the authorities helped to maintain the isolation of the lands of the Polish Commonwealth over a number of decades. The imperial quarantine lasted so long that, in essence, it prolonged the existence of a Polish Commonwealth long after the official demise of the Polish Commonwealth. The call for the restoration of the old border was one of the most unchanging political principles of the Polish nationalist movement. In the liberal Russian springs, Polish nationalists attempted to achieve this goal legally and within the framework of the empire (for example, expectations of the administrative and political unification of the entire Russian partition under Alexander I and the petitions of the late 1850s and early 1860s). The tendency of the Polish core to expand was considered by Russian public opinion to be the key to, and most distressing aspect of, the Polish question. At the same time Polish leaders had to show some flexibility and not treat the ‘‘annexed territories’’ as a single whole. Thus the moderate nationalists in Warsaw known as ‘‘Whites’’ primarily counted on recovering Lithuanian lands for Poland and recommended to the Polish emigration leaders in Paris that, in their contacts with the French government, they drop the demand for making Ukraine part of the Kingdom.61 Later, Polish leaders came to prefer the idea of combining the frontier with the Polish core in a federation based on the Uniate traditions of the Polish Commonwealth and on the granting of political self-determination to the peoples of the Russian-Polish border region. The regional and zonal division of the Russian-Polish frontier was seen differently from the perspective of the other ethnic groups within its orbit. On the periphery of the cores, the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Lithuanian nations were crystallizing, a process for which the Russian-Polish confrontation had created a sort of niche. When viewed as a niche, the frontier shows another structural layer: the process of nation building in various regions progressed at different speeds and with significant differences. The geopolitical projection of national ideas, in the Ukrainian case in particular, had its own history. This geography, however, which was not only brought about to a considerable degree by the Russian-Polish confrontation but influenced it as well, is the subject of another, separate study. 62 The geopolitical dimension also offers new possibilities for the study of the history of the Jews. The expulsion of the Jews from Moscow into the Pale of Settlement at the beginning of the 1890s was felt most strongly in the Polish core in regard to the difficult problem of the Lithuanian-Polish Jews, as it 139

Leonid Gorizontov reduced the chances of Polonizing the Jews, a process already under way. This is an exceptionally salient example of the interaction of the cores and proof of their interconnectivity and intercommunicability! As was shown above, by the end of the nineteenth century any concentration of Poles outside the boundaries of the former Polish Commonwealth came to be perceived by Russian nationalists as a violation of borders by the Poles and the creation of ‘‘little Polish Kingdoms.’’ Instead of an expanding Russian core, it was the Polish core that was expanding, and the shape of the zones separating them was developing in a manner considered ominous for imperial stability. There is an explanation of developments in the nineteenth century in Poland and, to some extent, even in Russia that attributes the Russian-Polish confrontation to fundamental differences in civilization. This view of the problem played an exceptionally important role in the developing consciousness of a number of nations and in the emergence of ethnic stereotypes and stereotypical self-images that have become part of historiography.63 The twentiethcentury concept of Central-Eastern Europe that places Russia outside the European cultural sphere was the product of lengthy polemics about ‘‘civilization’’ and ‘‘barbarism’’ that, with time, also engaged Ukraine and Belorussia. Strictly speaking, the question was, and is, defined more broadly. It is a question of the greater development and higher level of culture of the non-Russian western periphery of the empire as compared to its Russian core. Even so, an analysis of the actual mechanisms and processes that are usually associated with the superiority of a civilization allows one to make some significant corrections to current reconstructions of the past. This applies, for one thing, to the large number of Polish intellectuals and their active engagement outside the boundaries of their ethnic core, which was sometimes viewed as a civilizing mission. It also applies to the inability of the Russians to colonize and Russify the western borderlands, as well as to the various tempos with which industrialization and agriculture developed in different regions. In each case, when studying objective reasons and subjective motivations, it is necessary to devote primary attention to the historical, social, demographic, economic, and political modalities, and also to accurately employ historical comparisons. My studies have recorded a large and important layer of geopolitical concepts without which knowledge of the Russian-Polish conflict would be incomplete. The influence of the old borders, these ‘‘scars of history,’’ is one of the secrets of the imperial space, both real and mental. The battle against ‘‘Polonism’’ was waged not only on the enemy’s territory. Continuing the military metaphor, one could compare the Polish policy of the autocracy to a form of in-depth staggered defense, the boundary lines of which, in addition to the ‘‘two borders of 1772,’’ were the administrative border of the Kingdom of Poland, and—farther to the west—the ethnographic line 140

The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation that marked the preponderance of the Polish population. Defensive fortification lines simultaneously served as footholds for offensive operations. From the end of the nineteenth century, however, from the Russian side the mission of containment clearly became most prominent. In the interactions at the frontier between the Russian and Polish cores, one can observe in sharp relief the role of the visible and invisible border of 1772 and its place in the imperial geography of Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as its place on the mental maps of the people of that time. The most important element of the ‘‘imperial quarantine,’’ the border of 1772, served as a reference point for the regulation of the migration of Poles, and also, because it coincided with the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, of the Jews. For diametrically opposed reasons, it affected the migration of the East Slavic populace of the frontier as well. In parallel with the growth of concerns about the Russian core, Russians rejected both the Polish claims on the frontier area and the Polish core itself. Russian attempts to destroy the Polish core included a campaign that questioned its viability and inherent value. NOTES This essay was translated by Stella Hooker and David Ransel. 1. John LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitic of Expansion and Containment (New York, 1997), 3–4, 6–8. 2. L. E. Gorizontov, ‘‘Vnutrenniaia Rossiia i ee simvolicheskie voploshcheniia,’’ Rossiiskaia imperiia: strategii stabilizatsii i opyty obnovleniia (Voronezh, 2003). 3. One verst is approximately 1.06 kilometers. 4. K. Arsen’ev, Statisticheskie ocherki Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1848), 25–26, 164. 5. Ibid., 204–208, 214. 6. Severnaia pchela, no. 221 (1852). 7. S. Kieniewicz, ‘‘Wp™yw zaboru rosyjskigo na s´wiadomo´sc´ spo™eczenstwa ´ polskiego,’’ Dzieje najnowsze, no. 4 (1977): 106. 8. Ibid., 114. 9. S. Kieniewicz, Historyk a s´wiadomo´sc´ narodowa (Warsaw, 1982), 271. 10. I. S. Miller, Issledovaniia po istorii narodov Tsentral’noi i Vostochnoi Evropy XIX v. (Moscow, 1980), 443; V. I. Freidzon, Natsiia do natsional’nogo gosudarstva. Istoriko-sotsiologicheskii ocherk Tsentral’noi Evropy XVIII v nachala XX v. (Dubna, 1999), 24–30. 11. Polska XIX wieku. Panstwo. ´ Spo™eczenstwo. ´ Kultura (Warsaw, 1986), 97. 12. Known as Kaunas after 1917. 13. Zapiski Iosifa mitropolita Litovskogo, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1883), 1:573, 2:561. 14. P. Ia Chaadaev, Izbrannye sochineniia i pis’ma (Moscow, 1991), 225. 15. I. S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7 vols. (Moscow, 1886–87), 3:261, 264. 16. A. F. Gil’ferding, ‘‘Rossiia i ee inorodchiskie okrainy na zapade,’’ Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1868), Vol. 2. 17. S. D. Sazonov, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1991), 372.

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Leonid Gorizontov 18. T. Padalica, Listy z podró˙zy (Wilno, 1859), 1:82–84. 19. W. Bu™ha, Dmowski—Rosja a kwestia polska. U z´ róde™ orientacji rosyjskiej obozu narodowego 1886–1908 (Warsaw, 2000), 57. 20. F. F. Vigel’, Zapiski (Moscow, 2000), 33. 21. O. Aveide, Pokazaniia i zapiski o pol’skom vosstanii 1863 goda (Moscow, 1961), 269. 22. ‘‘Zolotoi vek Ekateriny Velikoi,’’ Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1996), 138. 23. S. Kieniewicz, ‘‘Kresy. Przemiany terminologiczne w perspektywie dziejowej,’’ Przeglad ˛ Wschodni, no. 1 (1991): 4. 24. Tsentralnii Derzhavnii istorichnii arkhiv Ukrainy (Kyiv), f. 442. op. 812. d. 227, l. 2. 25. Kieniewicz, ‘‘Kresy,’’ 4. 26. J. Bardach, ‘‘Polacy a narody Litwy historycznej—próba analizy systemowej,’’ Kultura i spo™eczenstwo, ´ no. 2 (1994). 27. A. Kappeler, Rossiia—mnogonatsional’naiia imperiia. Vozniknovenie, istoriia, raspad (Moscow, 2000), 64. 28. L. E. Gorizontov, ‘‘Vybor nositeliia ‘russkogo nachala’ v pol’skoi politike rossiiskoi imperii 1831–1917,’’ in Poliaki i russkie v glazakh drug druga (Moscow, 2000); L. E. Gorizontov, ‘‘Raskol’nichii klin. Pol’skii vopros i staroobriadtsy,’’ in Slavianskii al’manakh (Moscow, 1998). 29. ‘‘Zolotoi vek Ekateriny Velikoi,’’ 187–88; O. I. Eliseeva, Geopoliticheskie proekty G.A. Potemkina (Moscow, 2000), 255–59. 30. V. S. Shandra, Malorossiiske general-gubernatorstvo 1802–1856. Funktsii, struktura, arkhiv (Kyiv, 2001), 291, 304, 305, 312. See also the review of this book in ‘‘Belorussiia i Ukraina: istoria i kul’tura,’’ Ezhegodnik 2003 (Moscow, 2003). 31. A. I. Miller, ‘‘Ukrainskii vopros’’ v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.) (St. Petersburg, 2000), 112. 32. O. F. Kistiakivskii, Shchodennik (1874–1885) (Kyiv, 1994), 1:187–88. 33. L. E. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol’she (XIX–nachalo XX v.) (Moscow, 1999), 42. 34. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg) (hereafter, RGIA), f. 1290, op. 4, d. 59, l. 45. 35. Rossiiskii arkhiv, Istoriia Otechestva v svidetel’stvakh i dokumentakh XVIII–XX v, Vol. 6 (Moscow, 1995), 193. 36. ‘‘Materialy, sobrannye dlia vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi Komissii o preobrazovanii gubernskikh i uezdnykh uchrezhdenii. Otdel administrativnyi. Chast’ I,’’ Materialy istoricheskie i zakonodatel’nye. Otdelenie 6 (St. Petersburg, 1870), 38–39. 37. P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik ministra vnutrennikh del, Vol. 1 (Moscow, 1961), 221– 22, 224. 38. RGIA, f. 1290, op. 4, d. 59, l. 45ob; f. 1287, op. 24, d. 629, ll. 6, 7–7ob. 39. L. E. Gorizontov, ‘‘ ‘Bol’shaia russkaia natsiia’ v imperskoi i regional’noi strategii samoderzhaviia,’’ in Prostranstvo vlasti: istoricheskii opyt Rossii i vyzovy sovremennosti (Moscow, 2001). 40. Evlogii (Georgievskii), Put’ moei zhizni (Moscow, 1994), 196. 41. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki, 57. 42. A. Iu. Bakhturina, Politika Rossiiskoi imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 2000). 43. RGIA, f. 1290, op. 4, d. 59, ll. 56–56ob.

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The Geopolitical Dimension of Russian-Polish Confrontation 44. RGIA, f. 1290, op. 4, d. 59, l. 133ob. 45. RGIA, f. 1290, op. 4, d. 59, ll. 41ob–42. 46. D.A. Miliutin, Vospominaniia general-feld’marshala 1860–1862 (Moscow, 1999), 405. 47. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3:434–35. 48. Deiatel’nost’, no. 104 (May 31, 1870). 49. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki,130–34. 50. K. P. Pobedonostsev, Velikaia lozh’ nashego vremeni (Moscow, 1993), 507. 51. Istoricheskii obzor deiatel’nosti Komiteta ministrov (St. Petersburg, 1902), 4:222. 52. L. Volkov, ‘‘Itogi pol’sko-russkogo primireniia’’ (Moscow, 1898) (reprint of Russkii vestnik); ‘‘Ekonomicheskaia bor’ba Privislin’ia (K voprosu o tsentre i okrainakh),’’ Russkii vestnik, no. 10 (1899). 53. B. A., ‘‘K pol’skomu voprosu,’’ Novoe Vremia 15, no. 27 (May 1897). 54. D. Beauvois, Walka o ziemi˛e. Szlachta polska na Ukrainie prawobrze˙znej pomi˛edzy caratem a ludem ukrainskim ´ 1863–1914 (Sejny, 1996). 55. A. A. Mosolov, Pri dvore poslednego imperatora. Zapiski nachalnika kantseliarii ministra dvora (St. Petersburg, 1992), 173–78. 56. A. Kappeler, ‘‘Mazepintsy, malorossy, khokhly: ukraintsy v etnicheskoi ierarkhii Rossiiskoi imperii,’’ in Ukraina-Rossiia: istoriia vzaimootnoshenii (Moscow, 1997), 127– 30. 57. Shandra, Malorossiiske general-gubernatorstvo, 49. 58. V. Zaleski and K. Cieszkowski, Nieznane relacje o powstaniu styczniowym (Kielce, 1997), 38. 59. L. E. Gorizontov, Pol’skii aspekt podgotovki krest’ianskoi reformy v Rossii (Moscow, 2001). 60. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii (Moscow), f. 728, op. 1, d. 2271, ch. 32, l. 108; L. Gorizontow, ‘‘System zarz˛adzania Królestwem Polskim w latach trzydziestych—pi˛ec´ dziesi˛atych XIX w,’’ Przeglad ˛ Historyczny, no. 4 (1984). 61. D. Staliunas, ‘‘Litewscy biali i w™adze carskie przed powstaniem styczniowym: mi˛edzy konfrontacj˛a a kompromisem,’’ Przeglad ˛ Historyczny, no. 3 (1998). 62. L. E. Gorizontov, ‘‘Natsional’nye idei i ikh geopoliticheskie proektsii (Vostochnaia, Tsentralnaia i Iugo-Vostochnaia Evropa),’’ Slavianskii al’manakh 2002 (Moscow, 2003), 545–46. 63. L. E. Gorizontov, ‘‘Pol’skaia ‘tsivilizovannost’ i russkoe ‘varvarstvo’: osnovaniia dlia stereotipov i avtostereotipov,’’ Slavnovedenie, no. 1 (2004).

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Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Nineteenth-Century Russian Politics in Warsaw Robert L. Przygrodzki

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire had controlled Warsaw and much of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for approximately a century. The empire’s rule in Poland, however, was far from untroubled. Repeated Polish rebellions during the nineteenth century and a large revolutionary émigré population in France and Great Britain contested Russian claims of being the legitimate rulers of Poland. Russian authorities reacted by increasing their presence and ending the last vestiges of the Polish Kingdom’s autonomy in the years after the 1863 uprising. One of the most visible methods of staking a claim to the permanence and history of the Russian presence in Poland was through architecture: monuments, churches, and public buildings. The Staszic Palace, because of its significance to Poles and its connection with Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii (reigned 1606 to 1610), became a crucial site for Warsaw’s Russian community in justifying its presence in Poland and defining its national identity through the lens of its encounters with the Poles. The Staszic Palace became a concern for Russian authorities because of its significance to Polish society during the nineteenth century. The Polish 144

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics Society of the Friends of Science, under the leadership and sponsorship of Stanis™aw Staszic (1755–1826), erected the palace in 1820 to serve as its center; the building’s name (it was not officially called the ‘‘Staszic Palace’’) was a nod to the sponsor who had strongly supported intellectual endeavors in Poland throughout his life. The palace was intended to be a center for the development of Polish national enlightenment, which educated Poles hoped could eventually lead the way to Polish independence. The palace is located in the very center of Warsaw on the city’s primary street, Krakowskie Przedmie´scie. The gates of the University of Warsaw can be seen from it, and the Royal Castle is only a brief walk north. The neo-classical building was designed by Italian architect Antonio Corazzi (1792–1877), who had a hand in many of Warsaw’s major architectural projects in the first half of the nineteenth century, and who helped develop a specifically Polish neo-classical style.1 This style connected Polish culture with the broader European culture of the West and also announced the intellectual accomplishments and aspirations of the Polish nation. To further emphasize the value of science to the nation, the Society commissioned a bronze monument of Nicholas Copernicus, which it placed in the center of the square in front of the building. After the 1830 uprising, Russian authorities closed the Society and shipped its possessions to Russia. For the next few years the building faced an uncertain future. Russian government authorities rented out various rooms for the benefit of the school district’s financial accounts. It even became the home of the Directorate of the Lottery for a short time. In 1857, the viceroy offered the building as the site for the new Medical-Surgical Academy, but the academy’s director found the premises unsatisfactory. In 1865, it finally became the home for the Russian First Boys’ Gymnasium.2 The importance of the Staszic Palace to the Varsovian Russians changed during the course of the second half of the nineteenth century as its symbolic representation shifted from being a sign of Polish national enlightenment to becoming a monument to Russian history. Russian authorities ended the building’s use as a center for Polish learning early in the century, but it was not until after the January uprising of 1863 that the civil administration decided to convert it into a secondary school for Russian boys. By the turn of the century the building’s significance to Varsovian Russians increased after greater attention was brought to the site’s brief connection with Shuiskii. The tsar, along with his brother Dmitrii and sister-in-law Catherine, had died in Polish captivity in 1612 during Russia’s Time of Troubles (1589–1613). In 1620, King Zygmunt III ordered their remains brought to Warsaw and a crypt built for them on the site where the Staszic Palace later stood. The construction of a collective memory centered upon Shuiskii in the late nineteenth century represented an attempt by Varsovian Russians to produce their own part of a Russian narrative that also would link Warsaw to Russia. Such a ‘‘national biography,’’ according to Benedict Anderson, has to be written ‘‘up time’’ toward the earliest past because there is no clear birth for the nation. This 145

Robert L. Przygrodzki narrative is also ‘‘marked by deaths . . . which start from an originary present. [For example,] World War II begets World War I.’’3 Similarly, Russia’s control of Poland in the nineteenth century related to Shuiskii’s death nearly three centuries earlier. The redesign of the Staszic Palace according to Russian tastes attempted to tie Varsovian Russians, particularly the younger generation, to this historical narrative. By connecting them to a part of the national narrative (the Time of Troubles) while they lived and worked outside the (ethnic) Russian homeland, the building thus became a ‘‘memory palace.’’ Furthermore, by writing a Russian memory over a Polish one, Russian authorities also attempted to impose ‘‘social amnesia’’ upon the Polish population in an effort to end the Staszic Palace’s association among Polish elites as a center of Polish national scholarship.4 Among the concerns of the Russian community in Warsaw was the fear of its ‘‘Polonization’’ in the midst of a large and hostile Polish population. After the failed January uprising of 1863, Russian-Polish relations collapsed, and a return to cordial social interaction became impossible. Some Russians subscribed to the views of conservative nationalist Mikhail Katkov, who argued that the Russo-Polish conflict constituted a life or death struggle in which only one of the two could survive.5 Russian officials in Warsaw believed that harsh terms were necessary in dealing with the Poles as a way of making clear to them that Russians intended to be a permanent presence in Poland. Those Russians who had become too close to Polish society or married into it found their careers stalled or found themselves transferred out of the Congress Kingdom to other regions of the empire after the uprising.6 This policy of isolating Russian officials from Polish society, however, was not sustainable. Since Russian immigration to Warsaw was of an administrative nature, the numbers of Russian women and married couples coming from Russia proper to Poland were small. While officials in the highest echelons of the Russian administration tended to be married before arriving in the city, those who were younger and in the lower administrative ranks were far less likely to make the move to Warsaw if they had families. In spite of the initial social barriers maintained by both Poles and Russians, mixed marriages between Russian men and Polish women did take place. There were simply not enough prospective Russian marriage partners in Warsaw. Intermarriage between Poles and Russians gave rise to grave concerns among the leadership of the Varsovian Russian community about preserving the Russian identity of the following generations, particularly among the lower ranks of Russians in the midst of a Polish ocean. Russian leaders’ fears of Polonization focused on children, especially the offspring of mixed marriages. They were concerned that their Russian children would become culturally Polish through daily interactions with Polish fellow students and neighborhood children. The Russian leadership equated Russianness with the Russian Orthodox faith and loyalty to the autocracy. Any influence on children from Catholicism, which was equated with Polishness, threatened that identity. 146

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics Near the end of the nineteenth century the administrators of the Russiancontrolled Warsaw School District, responsible for the entire Congress Kingdom, voiced concerns about the dangers of the Polonization of Russian children and used that threat to justify the existence of exclusively Russian and Orthodox schools. The editors of the school district’s supplement to its circular wrote of the need to preserve the Russian language, Russian culture, and Orthodox faith through state education of Russian children, particularly if they came from families of mixed marriages in which the mother was Polish. The supplement’s author, Andrei Leont’evich Stefanovich, then director of the First Boys’ Gymnasium, warned that Russian children even preferred to respond to (Russian Orthodox) prayers in Polish. He complained that, after these children completed the educational institutions in Poland, they were ‘‘so Polonized that we already have lost the right to call them Russians.’’7 Along with the cultural threat Polish children represented to their Russian classmates, Stefanovich added a physical threat to the safety of Russian children to justify the existence of a purely Russian school system in Warsaw. The school district’s journal brought to the attention of Russian parents ‘‘one horrible fact, that in one of the Polish Kingdom’s gymnasia, one Russian student was nearly hanged by his non-Russian classmates because he was firm in his Russian and Orthodox convictions and did not give in to the suggestions of Polish propaganda.’’8 This story created a picture so vivid that Russian newspapers in Warsaw would repeat it as late as 1907.9 Apocryphal tales that omitted the specific location and date of the incident provided the impression that such instances could, and did, happen throughout the Kingdom and served to reinforce the image of the ‘‘dangerous and treacherous’’ Pole. The physical removal of Russian children from a Polish environment promised to protect their physical bodies as well as their cultural Russianness. In the late nineteenth century, the Russian community’s concerns about Polonization and Russian identity, their children, and their presence in Poland converged on one physical space: the Staszic Palace. On January 12, 1865, the building officially opened its doors as the First Boys’ Gymnasium.10 It was the first secondary school designed by the Warsaw School District specifically for the Russian population. Only children of Orthodox-Russian parents attended this school, which served to provide them with a ‘‘purely Russian corner’’ in Warsaw.11 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the palace needed renovating, Russians used the occasion to add a Russian appearance to this important Warsaw architectural site. As with all major projects funded by the city of Warsaw, approval had to go through St. Petersburg. What made this project different, however, was the magnitude of the planned renovations. The plans were the inspiration of the director of the school district, Aleksandr L. Apukhtin (1822–1904). During his term as director of the school district (1879– 1897) he Russified the educational system by eliminating the Polish language and Polish history from all schools. His anti-Polish policies earned him the 147

Robert L. Przygrodzki hatred of the Poles, who named his term in office the ‘‘Apukhtin Night.’’ Throughout his career Apukhtin was one of the most ardent supporters of Russian projects that promised to further Russian culture within the Polish Kingdom. The Staszic Palace renovation was his last major effort before his retirement in 1897, and he actively defended it through its early stages.12 Apukhtin also organized charitable efforts among Russians that raised more than eighty thousand rubles needed for the renovations.13 In 1891, Stefanovich joined Apukhtin in the drive to complete the project and took formal control of the building committee. Under their leadership, the renovations followed a Russian national course. The committee decided to hire the Che™m-Warsaw Russian Orthodox archbishopric’s architect, Vladimir Pokrovskii, to design what would be a completely new building.14 Pokrovskii finished his plans in 1893, and the planning committee sent the proposal to St. Petersburg the same year. In an attempt to bolster the project’s success, the committee added the opinions of University of Warsaw professor Dmitrii Tsvetaev and University of Kiev professor A. Prokhov, who was an early proponent of the project.15 The enthusiastic support for the plans among Warsaw’s Russians was not initially echoed in St. Petersburg. The academic community did not accept the historical interpretations of professors Tsvetaev or Prokhov. The strongest resistance to the proposal came from the archaeological committee responsible for the conservation of monuments. The representative of the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts on the Ministry of Interior’s Technical Committee also voiced strong resistance to Apukhtin’s project. He questioned its artistic quality and the destruction of a major work representing Varsovian architecture. Part of the difficulties the project faced also resulted from a scandal caused by the Varsovian Russian leadership. In the rush to begin the project local officials had dismantled the building’s upper stories in early 1892, before the proposal had been submitted, let alone approved. Bureaucratic procedures had clearly been violated. The fate of the project was uncertain until the end of 1893, when Apukhtin’s intercessions to Alexander III finally succeeded in obtaining the support needed to get the project approved.16 In appointing Pokrovskii as the project’s architect, Apukhtin’s committee made clear its intentions for the Staszic Palace. As the archdiocese’s architect, many of his projects had been Russian Orthodox churches that followed the neo-Muscovite (historicist) style then popular among Russian urban planners throughout the empire. Rather than maintaining Corazzi’s neo-classical style, Pokrovskii’s intention was for the building to recall the Muscovite past. The most radical changes were to be made to the facade. Pokrovskii chose a highly ornamental style that evoked memories of Moscow’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kremlin.17 One of the major examples of the style, the Historical Museum of Moscow (1874–83, designed by Vladimir Shervud) exerted a strong influence on the design of the renovated Staszic Palace. This

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Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics style saturated building facades with decorative motifs from Muscovite architecture. Kokoshniki (superimposed arches), pointed gables, tent roofs, or domes resting on drums were heavily employed to create a pre-Petrine (Muscovite) appearance that intended to remind the observer of a more ‘‘purely’’ Russian epoch before Muscovite culture acquired the Western corruptions during the reign of Peter the Great.18 In the interior, the main staircase and the old meeting hall of the defunct Polish Society of the Friends of Science were to undergo substantial modifications to make room for a large rectangular church on the second floor that would eclipse the previous chapel. Pavel A. Svedomskii was commissioned to paint the church’s main iconostasis and numerous other paintings in the building.19 Only the monument to Nicholas Copernicus on the square in front of the building would remain untouched. Not surprisingly the Polish response was negative, although it was not fully expressed until Polish independence followed the end of World War I. Polish opinion was best demonstrated by the speed with which the neo-Muscovite facade was replaced by Corazzi’s original designs to house the Warsaw Scientific Society after the rise of an independent Polish state in 1918.20 Local Russian officials and reporters actively supported the renovation plans and described the controversy over the building’s appearance as yet another great battle between the Russians and the Poles. The Russian press declared the project to be a ‘‘patriotic and holy’’ endeavor that commemorated a martyred Russian ruler and reacted to Polish hostility with the argument that the presence of Russian Orthodox churches in the very center of Warsaw should not upset Poles since Roman Catholic churches existed ‘‘in the center of the Orthodox Russian capital, on Nevskii Prospect.’’21 Such arguments conveniently ignored the different meanings the respective buildings had under contemporary conditions and only weakly masked the heavy-handed use of Russian power in Warsaw. Roman Catholic churches in St. Petersburg served a powerless minority in the empire’s capital, whereas Russian Orthodox churches in the center of Russian-occupied Warsaw served the political purpose of physically expressing Russian power over Poles. Because of its connection with Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace earned the special attention of the Varsovian Russian leadership. Aside from Russian Orthodox churches, no other major buildings in Warsaw applied the neoMuscovite style. The next large-scale state building project, the Nicholas II Polytechnic Institute (1899–1902; Stefan Szyller, architect), followed the popular architectural styles of the West. Shuiskii’s burial on the Staszic site, unlike other locations, offered the possibility for Varsovian Russians to create a piece of Russian space in Warsaw with a connection to the national narrative. The new school building was to remind passers-by of a Russian Orthodox Church which one could find ‘‘only in Orthodox Moscow, ancient Rostov, and Great Novgorod and [which] will be a fitting patriotic memorial to the great devout and tsar-loving Russian nation.’’22 Because of concerns about the Polonization

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Robert L. Przygrodzki

The Staszic Palace after 1893, renovated in neo-Muscovite style, in a postcard from the period. Courtesy of Centre for Social Studies, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

of Russians in the midst of a Polish ocean, Russian leaders in Warsaw wanted to anchor their community in Russia through the use of the collective memory of Shuiskii. Warsaw’s Russian leadership had been keen on physically ‘‘Russifying’’ this site connected to Shuiskii because of the particular role he played in Russo-Polish history. The location represented for Warsaw’s Russians the nadir of Russian history and also the highest point of Polish history. Shuiskii came to 150

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics power during the Time of Troubles after the murder of Tsar Dmitrii, who had married a Polish woman and had the support of a large Polish retinue and army. Shuiskii ordered the massacre of the Poles in Moscow and fought against them during much of his brief reign.23 Zygmunt III Waza (reigned 1587 to 1632) responded by claiming the Russian throne and embarking upon a conquest of Russia. In 1610, Shuiskii became the captive of hetman Stanis™aw ˙ Zó™kiewski (1547–1620), and Polish troops briefly held Moscow itself. Shuiskii was taken to Poland and died in captivity in 1612 in Gostynin Castle not far from Warsaw. A few years later, in 1620, Zygmunt III had Shuiskii’s remains brought to Warsaw and built a mausoleum in Warsaw’s outer limits on Krakowskie Przedmie´scie. The site, however, held Shuiskii’s remains only briefly. By 1634, with the conclusion of peace between Poland and Muscovy, Russian diplomats, at the request of the new Romanov tsar Mikhail, brought Shuiskii’s remains to Moscow. In 1648, in a final gesture to the Russians, the Polish king shipped to Russia the memorial’s marble plaque commemorating the Polish victory over Moscow and Shuiskii’s burial. Not long afterward, the mausoleum was torn down and the land became the site of a monastery and church for the Observant Dominican Order. The land’s connection with a dead Russian tsar had been nearly forgotten until the early nineteenth century. Alexander I briefly mentioned the possibility of building a Russian Orthodox Church there, and in 1816 the viceroy, General Józef Zaj˛aczek (1752–1826), ordered the monastery’s buildings razed with that initial intention. The connection with Shuiskii, however, had not become important enough in the early nineteenth century to complete such a project. The land instead became the site for the Polish Society of the Friends of Science—the Staszic Palace. The link to Shuiskii grew in importance at the end of the century, as Russian school administrators voiced concerns over the cultural Russianness of Russian Orthodox children. Because the Staszic Palace was already a school for Russian boys and had this brief connection with the dead tsar, it became the focal point in the cultural battle with Poles to prevent the Polonization of Russian children and also provided a usable collective memory for the Varsovian Russian community. With a pre-Petrine inspired facade, the school became a Russian space that insulated children from the outside Polish world and created an environment deemed conducive by school authorities for the transmission of Russian culture. This memorial to the Muscovite-era tsar reminded Russian passers-by that the conflict between Russians and Poles had a long history and that the fight against the Poles had not ended but continued, although under conditions considerably more favorable for Russia. In the drive to prove the appropriateness of their plans for the site, the Varsovian Russian leadership appropriated and modified the history of earlyseventeenth-century Russia and Poland to suit its needs. No one questioned that the general site once contained the dead tsar, but leaders supporting the renovations adopted an interpretation of the conditions of his burial that had 151

Robert L. Przygrodzki little support outside Warsaw’s Russian community. The historian Dmitrii Tsvetaev had written on this particular issue and argued that a fully functioning church had once existed there. Part of his argument focused on the common name used in the seventeenth century to designate the burial place. The mausoleum became known as the Kaplica Moskiewska, the Muscovite chapel. Professor Prokhov also claimed that archaeological evidence supported the existence of a structure large enough for a chapel.24 Additionally, some eighteenth-century Russians and Poles believed that an Orthodox chapel had been erected on the land at the time of Shuiskii’s burial, but that position had not been supported by historical and archaeological evidence. Polish and many other Russian scholars, who found evidence only of a burial crypt, rejected Tsvetaev’s and Prokhov’s claims.25 Although it may appear odd for Poles and Russians to debate this point, the question of a functioning church that held services for the dead tsar was important to the political claims of Varsovian Russians. Orthodox services held on this site would have consecrated it as a spiritual part of Russia commemorating a ‘‘saintly prince’’ who died for his country. That a tsar had been buried in that location sanctified it in the eyes of local Russian officials, particularly since the ruler had died in suffering as a captive of the Poles. During the 1890s Russians in Warsaw mapped out points in the city that had linkages, however brief, to past Russian rulers. Some leading Russians in Warsaw intended to commemorate these sites with monuments in order to represent Warsaw’s history through a Russian lens.26 They wished not only to commemorate Shuiskii but also to blot out the shame of being at the mercy of the Poles. In this fashion they hoped that the Poles would be made to understand that such a humiliating situation had been reversed permanently and that Poles would never again have supremacy over Russians. The surest way of clarifying the new power relationship involved erecting on the site of the former mausoleum a Muscovite-styled building that contained a new Orthodox Church dedicated to serve the Russian children studying there. Once the project had the approval of St. Petersburg, the particular symbols connected with the new church were designed with the contemporary political environment in mind. Before the renovation, the school had a small chapel on the second floor dedicated to Saints Cyril and Methodius, which was a choice of patron saints appropriate for a Russian school. They were the monks who introduced Christianity and literacy to the Eastern Slavic world. The new church was larger and employed some of the most popular icon artists of the day. Intending it to be the home of Russian students in Warsaw, Apukhtin used the Smolnyi Institute of St. Petersburg as a model. He named the church for St. Tatiana the Martyr, whose day of observance coincided with the opening of the First Boys’ and Girls’ Gymnasia. The choice of Tatiana also created a connection between the early Christian martyr who died for her faith and the Russian tsar who was martyred in his fight against the Poles.27 The bells placed in the church towers also sent a distinct political message 152

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics to both the city’s Russians as well as the Poles. The largest bell bore the images of two saints, Basil the Great and Alexander Nevskii, Prince of Novgorod (1218–1263). Russian leaders intended to recall the ancient roots of the Orthodox Church by using the image of St. Basil the Great, one of the Church Fathers of the fourth century. St. Basil connected modern Russia to the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, offering a cultural lineage as ancient as the Western one claimed by the Poles. The name also made a direct connection with the dead tsar—Vasilii is the Russian version of Basil. In choosing Nevskii, Russian officials used a symbol of Russian power. Nevskii became a popular saint not long after his death and was commemorated for his victory over the Swedes on the Neva River in 1240. Under Peter the Great, Nevskii gained official support as Russia’s protector against its traditional enemies and became the patron saint of Peter I’s new city. It should be remembered that both Sweden and Poland invaded Russia during the Time of Troubles and also that the Polish Waza (Vasa) kings were themselves Swedes and claimed the Swedish throne. Thus Nevskii symbolized Russian strength when facing its enemies, and Russian officials used his image wherever they intended to leave an impression of Russian power. During the nineteenth century, Russian secular and religious authorities built a great number of churches and chapels to Alexander Nevskii throughout the empire and anywhere else that these authorities wanted to express their power.28 Additionally, secular and religious officials made note of the shared name of the saint and three nineteenthcentury Russian emperors on occasions commemorating churches connected to Nevskii. Noting that ‘‘the name Alexander is a glorious and sacred name in our national history,’’ religious leaders could point to the ways in which Alexander I, Alexander II, and Alexander III continued the Nevskii legacy by protecting and defending Russia.29 The message would have been clear to Poles. The Russian state had defeated them twice during the uprisings of 1831 and 1863, and wanted to remind the Poles that any rebellious actions against Russia would be crushed. The large bell bearing the images of Saints Basil the Great and Alexander Nevskii also bore the phrase: ‘‘God is with us. Understand these pagans.’’ Here was a clear warning to Poles that Russian power could not be extinguished. In case the message was lost on the Poles, a few years later the Octobrist30 editors of Nedelia okrainy declared that ‘‘the bell of our Orthodox temple drones and tells the long sad story of the Russian tsar’s imprisonment, through his death, to the liberated Rus’ which then imprisoned Poland for all ages.’’31 They redefined Shuiskii’s captivity: no longer the nadir of Russia’s history, it had become the legitimator of the contemporary political situation. Poland had committed a ‘‘crime’’ by imprisoning a Russian tsar, and that crime led to Poland’s punishment in the form of its own imprisonment under Russian control. The next largest bell bore reliefs of St. Tatiana the Martyr and St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, the latter being an obvious reference to Tsar Nicholas II. 153

Robert L. Przygrodzki Apukhtin made a point of noting in his 1893 proposal for the project that there would be a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas in thanks for the ‘‘miracle’’ that saved the life of the then prince Nicholas on a visit to Japan in 1891. The patrons of the old school chapel, Cyril and Methodius, made their appearance on the third largest bell. In all, the bell tower held ten bells and was completed in October 1897.32 In early March 1898, the iconostases were completed. The renovation of the First Boys’ Gymnasium also earned the official attention of the emperor himself. Alexander III’s support of the renovation plans saved the plans from a bureaucratic death and put the project’s construction on a fast track. Although Alexander III died (1894) before he could visit Warsaw to see the project, it did become a part of Nicholas II’s itinerary on his official state visit to Warsaw in September 1897. The tour of the new school building took place on August 22 /September 3 in the afternoon. As with many such official state occasions, all the imaginable school officials gathered, the students sang, banners and flags waved, and flowers flooded the building to greet Nicholas II and Alexandra. The imperial couple toured the still unfinished church, where artists were painting the frescoes.33 Nicholas’s presence represented the Russian response to the exile and death of Shuiskii under Polish control nearly three centuries before. By visiting the memorial to a predecessor’s suffering and death, Nicolas II acted as the participant in the final chapter of the Shuiskii narrative constructed by Varsovian Russians. The first Romanov tsar, Mikhail, began the process of correcting the wrong that Poles had done to Shuiskii by bringing his remains back to Moscow. Nicholas closed the narrative by visiting the building that commemorated Shuiskii’s suffering and his fight against the Poles. As the Russian ruler of Poland, he personified the message of the renovation: Russia would never again be at the mercy of Poland. The following year, on November 3/15, 1898, the Orthodox Church’s archbishop, Ieronim, consecrated the gymnasium’s church of St. Tatiana the Martyr. Smaller celebrations had been held during construction to consecrate the erection of the cross and the placement of the bells. At this celebration of the project’s completion the leading proponents of the renovation, Apukhtin and Stefanovich, were prominent, as was most of the leadership of the Congress Kingdom; governor-general Alexander Imeretinskii, the rectors of the University and Polytechnic Institute, and the rest of the civil and military leadership all attended. (Oddly no mention was made of Sokrates Starynkevich, the president of Warsaw).34 The important role of the Orthodox Church in the education of Russian children naturally became a part of the celebrations. Children of mixed marriages, impoverished families, and orphans were declared to be the ones who would benefit from the increased attention to education instituted by the leaders of the school district and the Congress Kingdom. The new building and its church were the physical indicators of this attention to Russian children. The primary focus of those participating, however, was political.35 The other purpose of the 1898 gathering was to memorialize the tempo154

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics

The Staszic Palace today, restored to its original neo-classical design. Photograph by David L. Ransel.

rary burial place of Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, his brother Dmitrii, and the latter’s wife Catherine. The Russian press quoted conservative Nicholas Karamzin36 (1766–1826) as an authority on the period, describing Shuiskii’s life as ‘‘disastrous but not inglorious.’’ The new church served to remind Russians and Poles that Russia’s period of suffering was in the past and would not be repeated. The archpriest’s speech did not concern itself with the spiritual education of Russian youth as much as it did with commemorating Shuiskii’s memory and the appropriateness of a Muscovite-styled church as the physical means of that commemoration. The emphasis on Shuiskii and the building’s neo-Muscovite style exposed the building’s purpose.37 The school and church did not simply fill an institutional gap that the Russian community needed for its own functioning. Varsovian Russians wanted to legitimize their presence, warn the Poles, and protect their sense of ‘‘Russianness’’ in their own community. The event also served to strengthen the propagandistic connection of the three nineteenth-century Russian emperors to the site. The speakers interpreted the link that Alexander I, Alexander II, and Alexander III had with the former burial site as battles against the Poles. Because Alexander I thought it would be appropriate to build a church to commemorate Shuiskii’s burial on 155

Robert L. Przygrodzki the location, authorities razed the old Dominican Church in 1816. Russian authorities in Warsaw at the end of the century had every reason to believe that they were finally executing Alexander I’s plans, noting that ‘‘the wishes of our Sovereign [to build a church at this site] were not fulfilled at that time.’’38 Speakers at the consecration invoked Alexander II’s name with the reminder that the building became the First Boy’s Gymnasium during his reign. That institution, they pointed out, benefited Russian education rather than Polish enlightenment. Finally, speeches also pointed to Alexander III as the patron of the current project.39 In 1904, Russian officials made their final contribution to the Staszic Palace’s physical ‘‘Russification’’ after the death of the hated director Apukhtin. Underneath the arcade at the front of the building, the Russian leadership of Poland erected a large memorial to Apukhtin as a Russian educator.40 The frequent concerns that Russians in Warsaw expressed for their children tied in with Russo-Polish politics and the contradictory interpretations of their mutual history. Because of Varsovian Russian leaders’ worries about mixed marriages and the surrounding Polish urban environment, the cultural Russianness of Warsaw’s Russian colony became an important issue within that community. The Varsovian Russians felt the distinct need to create a ‘‘pure’’ (chistoe) Russian environment for ‘‘pure’’ Russians (that is, children of Russian Orthodox fathers or Uniates forced to convert to Russian Orthodoxy). The style of architecture that Russian leaders believed most symbolized a ‘‘pure’’ Russian culture was one that looked to the pre-Petrine past for its inspiration. Choosing a Russian historicist style was their way of distinguishing themselves from the greater Polish population they encountered daily. It also drew a connection to the Muscovite-era tsar whose story played an important role in the politics surrounding the Staszic Palace renovations. The coincidence of the First Boys’ Gymnasium resting on the same real estate as the temporary burial site of Vasilii Shuiskii married national fears concerning children with a memory of national shame concerning the Time of Troubles and the Polish-Swedish occupation. It created the possibility of protecting one and vindicating the other in one stroke. Russian students were physically surrounded by a mythologized version of Russia to save them from the alien Polish exterior, while the dead tsar was equated with martyrdom for his suffering at the hands of two great enemies in the single embodiment of the Swedish king of Poland, Zygmunt III. The greatest vindication for that shame was to erect in stone a symbol that clearly displayed the reversal of Russia’s fortunes. A Muscovite-styled building in the heart of Warsaw gave notice to Poles that the circumstances had changed permanently in the Russians’ favor. Varsovian Russians appropriated the particular story of Vasilii Shuiskii to legitimize their presence and rule in Warsaw. They interpreted Shuiskii’s imprisonment and death as a Polish ‘‘crime’’ that resulted in Poland’s punishment as a partitioned state under Russian domination. Russians in Warsaw may not have been able to claim the right to rule Poles through the assertion of possessing a 156

Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics superior culture, but they found a justification for that rule through the suffering of a seventeenth-century tsar. NOTES I wish to thank the Fulbright Commission and Northern Illinois University for making my research in Poland possible. 1. Piotr Bieganski, ´ Pa™ac Staszica. Siedziba Towarzystwa Naukowego Warszawskiego (Warsaw: Naklad Towarzystwa Naukowego Warszawskiego, 1951), 39–40. 2. Ibid., 75. 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 205. 4. Peter Burke, ‘‘History as Social Memory,’’ in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 97–113. 5. Mikhail Katkov (1818–1887), the conservative nationalist editor of Russkii vestnik and Moskovskie vedomosti, frequently wrote on the Polish question, often arguing for the harshest treatment of a population he considered treasonous. 6. Andrzej Chwalba, Polacy w s™u˙zbie Moskali (Warsaw: PWN, 1999), 34–39. 7. A. L. Stefanovich, Zapiska o pervykh muzhskoi i zhenskoi gimnaziiakh v Varshave, supplement to Tsirkuliar po Varshavskomu uchebnomu okrugu, no. 6 (1893): 3–4. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. ‘‘Pervyia Varshavskiia gimnasiia i tserkov pervoi muzhskoi gimnazii,’’ Nedelia okrainy, no. 6 (April 16 [29], 1907): 2–6. 10. Piotr Paszkiewicz, Pod ber™em Romanowów: Sztuka rosyjska w Warszawie 1815–1915 (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki-PAN, 1991), 79. 11. R.E.D., ‘‘ Proshchan’e b. Popechitelia Varshavskago uchebnago okruga, A. L. Apukhtina s pervymi Varshavskimi gimnaziiami 2 marta 1897 goda,’’ KholmskoVarshavskii eparkhial’nyi vestnik, no. 6 (March 15 [27], 1897): 108. 12. A. A. Sidorov, Russkie i russkaia zhizn’ v Varshave 1815–1898: Istoricheskii ocherk (Varshava, 1901), 165–66. 13. ‘‘Pervyia Varshavskiia gimnasiia,’’ 2–6. 14. Paszkiewicz, Pod ber™em Romanowów, 98. 15. Ibid. 16. Sidorov, Russkie i russkaia zhizn’, 173; Paszkiewicz, Pod ber™em Romanowów, 99. 17. Bieganski, ´ Pa™ac Staszica, 79–80. 18. For more on the historicist style (also referred to as the Slavic Revival), see William Craft Brumfeld A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 393–424; and George Heard Hamilton, The Art and Architecture of Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 388–395. 19. ‘‘Pervyia Varshavskiia gimnasiia,’’ 2–6. Pavel Aleksandrovich Svedomskii (1849–1904) was known for genre and historical painting, and also decorated the Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev. 20. Bieganski, ´ Pa™ac Staszica, 80. 21. ‘‘Novyi pravoslavnyi khram v Varshave,’’ Kholmsko-Varshavskii eparkhial’nyi vestnik, no. 18 (September 15 [27], 1893): 301. 22. Ibid.

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Robert L. Przygrodzki 23. Shuiskii, however, did not have great popular support for his actions. There were also other pretenders who competed for the throne. He particularly earned the ire of Zygmunt III for allying himself with Sweden, because Zygmunt had been at war with Sweden in his dynastic claim for that throne. 24. W™adys™aw Tomkiewicz, ‘‘Warszawa jako o´srodek z˙ ycia artystycznego i intelektualnego,’’ in Warszawa w latach 1526–1795. Dzieje Warszawy, ed. Maria Bogucka et al. (Warsaw: Panstwowe wydatnictwo naukowe, 1984), vol. 2 157; and Dmitrii Tsvetaev, Tsar Vasilii Shuiiskii i mesto pogrebeniia ego v Polshe (Warsaw: Tipografiia Varshavskago uchebnago okruga, 1910), 113–15. 25. Tsvetaev, Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, 560; Paszkiewicz, Pod ber™em Romanowów, 96. 26. A. A. Sidorov, Russkie gosudari v Varshave (Warsaw: Artisticheskaia tipografiia saturnika sikorskago, 1897). This short book (twenty-eight pages) served as something of a guidebook to the various sites connecting Shuiskii, Peter I, and the modern tsars to Warsaw. 27. Tatiana the Martyr was a third-century Christian martyred for refusing to bring offerings to pagan gods. See I. Bukharev, Zhitiia vsekh sviatykh prazsnuemykh pravoslavnoiu greko-rossiiskoiu tserkoviiu (Moscow: Tipografiia I. D. Sytina, 1896), 30–31. 28. Pawel Klimow, ‘‘Ikonografia Aleksandra Newskiego w religijnym malarstwie rosyjskim XIX i poczatku XX wieku. O zwi˛azkach kultu, kultury i polityki w sztuce rosyjskiej,’’ in Nacjonalizm w sztuce i historii sztuki 1789–1950, ed. Dariusz Konstantynów, Robert Piaseczny, and Piotr Paszkiewicz (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki—PAN, 1998), 117–26. Churches dedicated to Nevskii were erected in Tampere (Finland), Reval (Estonia), Warsaw (the project began shortly after the Staszic renovation), Sofia (Bulgaria), Copenhagen, and Paris. For more on Russian politics and church construction, see Piotr Paszkiewicz, W s™u˙zbie Imperium Rosyjskiego, 1721–1917 (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki—PAN, 1999). 29. ‘‘ Zakladka novago pravoslavnago sobornago khrama v Varshave 30 avgusta 1894 g.,’’ Kholmsko-Varshavskii eparkhial’nyi vestnik, no. 17 (September 1 [13], 1894): 277. 30. The Octobrist Party was a nationalist party that supported the imperial concessions offered by the October Manifesto during the 1905 Revolution and argued against further liberalization. 31. ‘‘O meste pervoi usypal’nitsy Tsaria Vasiliia Ioannovicha Shuiskago,’’ Nedelia okrainy, no. 3 (March 26 [April 8], 1907): 2. 32. Tsvetaev, Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, 555; Paszkiewicz, Pod ber™em Romanowów, 100–101. 33. ‘‘Prebyvanie Ikh Imperatorskikh Velichestv v Varshave,’’ Kholmsko-Varshavskii eparkhial’nyi vestnik, no. 17 (September 1 [13], 1897): 310. 34. ‘‘Torzhestvo osviashcheniia khrama Varshavskoi i muzhskoi gimnazii,’’ Kholmsko-Varshavskii eparkhial’nyi vestnik, no. 22 (November 15 [27], 1898): 452. Sokrates Starynkevich (1820–1902) was not popular with Russian officials, in part because he actively modernized the city and succeeded in making himself the only genuinely loved Russian among the Polish population. His monument is the only public art of a Russian official of that period preserved in Warsaw today. 35. ‘‘Torzhestvo osviashcheniia khrama,’’ 450–52. 36. Nicholas Karamzin created a publishing phenomenon in the early nineteenth century when his multivolume History of the Russian State was published and sold out

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Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii, the Staszic Palace, and Russian Politics in a matter of weeks. This work created intense debates and had an immediate effect on Russia’s intellectual and literary environment. 37. ‘‘Torzhestvo osviashcheniia khrama,’’ 451–52. 38. Sidorov, Russkiie gosudari, 28. 39. ‘‘Torzhestvo osviashcheniia khrama,’’ 450–52. 40. Paszkiewicz, Pod berlem Romanowów, 100.

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ten

At Home with Pani Eliza Isaac Babel and His Polish Encounters Judith Deutsch Kornblatt

In the second story of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Konarmiia), titled ‘‘The Catholic Church of Novograd’’ (‘‘Kostel v Novograde’’) after the location of its action, the narrator seeks out his military commander at the latter’s current billet. While waiting for the commissar’s return from headquarters, Liutov— the name of the narrator as well as the pseudonym of Babel himself during the months he participated as propagandist in the Soviet-Polish campaign of 1920—rests for a few moments from the murder and destruction of the war around him. In the parsonage’s kitchen, he is served ‘‘some amber tea and biscuits’’ (iantarnogo chaiu s biskvitami) by Pani Eliza, the housekeeper that the ‘‘absconded priest’’ has recently left behind (2:8/93).1 The pani and her hospitality appear twice more in the cycle of thirty-five stories, once in ‘‘Pan Apolek’’ and again in the opening of the following story, ‘‘The Sun of Italy’’ (‘‘Solntse Italii’’). She is merely a brief memory in ‘‘Pan Apolek,’’ provoked in Liutov by the portrait of a ‘‘remarkable red-cheeked Holy Virgin that hung above the matrimonial bed of Pani Eliza,’’ painted by the eponymous hero of the story. She has a larger role in the next story, the inner narrative of which reproduces a heartrending letter by the ‘‘depressed killer,’’ the Cossack Sidorov 160

At Home with Pani Eliza (2:26/113). In the opening frame of this story of anguish, however, Liutov again spends a comfortable evening in Pani Eliza’s kitchen, sitting by the ‘‘warm, living, querulous stove’’ (u teploi, zhivoi, vorchlivoi pechi) (2:26/112). Pani Eliza and her Polish domesticity are introduced in the stories with strikingly evocative descriptions, such as that of her biscuits that ‘‘smelled like the crucifixion. A cunning juice was contained within them, the fragrant fury of the Vatican’’ (2:8/93).2 The only other character in Pani Eliza’s kitchen, Pan Romuald, is described in equally curious fashion; he is a ‘‘nasal eunich with the body of a giant,’’ whose ‘‘narrow soutane rustled at every threshold, furiously swept every path, and grinned at anyone who wanted to drink vodka’’ (2:8/94). Liutov meets analogously expressive, if minor Polish characters in ‘‘At St. Valentine’s’’ (‘‘U Sviatogo Valentina’’), a curiously similar story that takes place not in Novograd, however, but in Beresteczko, another stop on the route of the First Cavalry Army in the ill-fated campaign of the spring and summer of 1920. In both ‘‘The Catholic Church in Novograd’’ and ‘‘At St. Valentine’s,’’ the priest has fled the advancing Cossacks (in the later story, curiously ‘‘dressed up like a woman [2:86/177]), and Liutov is at once seduced and aghast at the desecration of the now empty churches by his fellow soldiers.3 Both stories describe the secularized, even domesticated religious paintings of Pan Apolek, whose aesthetic ‘‘gospel’’ Liutov vows to follow (‘‘Surrounded by the guileless radiance of haloes, I took a vow that day that I would follow the example of Pan Apolek’’ [2:18/104]). And both, again, sport unusual Polish characters: Pani Eliza in the first with her ‘‘attentive gray locks’’ (2:8/ 93), and, in the second, Pan Ludomirski and his wife, who moves ‘‘like a dog with a broken paw,’’ and wipes away tears with her flowing yellow hair (2:86–87/178). Although the roles of these caretakers are minor and their tasks in the church are menial, their descriptions in the stories are far from mundane. Scholars have rarely concentrated on Liutov’s relationship with his temporary Polish hosts, choosing instead to explore Babel’s attitude toward the Cossacks with whom he travels or toward the Jews he encounters along the way or both.4 If anything, Liutov’s attraction to Poles in these stories (and the narrator speaks of the ‘‘insinuating temptations’’ of the priest’s house [vkradchivye ego soblazny; 2:8/94]) has been easily dismissed as Babel’s indiscriminate sympathy for all victims. Commenting on references to Poles in the diary Babel kept during the summer of 1920, and on which Red Cavalry is quite transparently based, Carol Avins claims that ‘‘Babel, always alert to otherness, was intrigued by what he saw of Polish culture and quick to draw conclusions about it (often falling into cliché).’’5 As suggested above, however, Pani Eliza and her fellow Poles are not clichés, neither for Liutov nor, for that matter, for Liutov’s creative mentor, who painted Eliza into her own icon: ‘‘The fleshy face of the Virgin,’’ that hangs over her bed, ‘‘was a portrait of Pani Eliza’’ herself (2:19/104). This welcoming character, and the comfort the narrator feels while fed and watered by her, are especially intriguing considering the fact that Liutov 161

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt feels ‘‘at home’’ in precious few places throughout the stories: not with the plundered Jewish family with whom he billets in the first story nor with the Hasidic Jews who allow him to share the Jewish Sabbath nor with the Russian Cossacks he is always trying to educate, and emulate, in one form or another. Even in what we might call the ‘‘Cossack initiation’’ story of the cycle, ‘‘My First Goose’’ (‘‘Moi pervyi gus’ ’’), when Liutov is finally invited to share a meal and sleep intertwined with his fellow fighters, we read in the end that, ‘‘my heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed’’ (2:34/123). He is never fully at peace with his fellows, whether Jewish or Russian. Why, then, should Liutov find moments of repose in Pani Eliza’s Polish kitchen at the same time that the Soviet Red Army, to which he has pledged allegiance, is fighting against the Poles? The following pages explore this question of Russian, or rather RussianJewish identity in Polish confrontation with a triple hypothesis. First, I posit that Babel was attracted to the Poles not as victims, as has been claimed, but as fellow wanderers. As we will see, however, the Poles are wanderers of a different sort than the archetypal wandering Jew, for they remain stationary while their homeland wanders from beneath them. Second, despite the dislocation of their home, the Polish characters in Red Cavalry ironically represent stability, continuity with the past, the endurance of Western European bourgeois and, as Babel saw it, ‘‘Jewish’’ domestic values, all in the midst of a rapidly changing cultural and political landscape. In many ways, then, third: Babel sees an albeit transmuted correspondence between the Poles and his own Russian-Jewish identity. This is not a political, and certainly not a historical correspondence but rather an aesthetic one. We will work backward through these proofs, to the conclusion that Liutov’s encounters with Polish characters and their ironically domestic homelessness ultimately reveal truths not only about the Poles, and not only about the Jews or the Cossacks in the Soviet Red Army, but also about the postrevolutionary world (dis)order as a whole.

Polish-Jewish Convergence There are numerous indications that Babel associates the Polish characters he creates in Red Cavalry with the Jews. Perhaps the most pervasive imagery that connects them is of scent; both the Poles and the Jews are odoriferous—or, more usually, strangely but attractively malodorous. They are smelly with the odor of age and decay, like the biscuits whose ‘‘cunning juice’’ smells of the crucifixion, and like the Jewish ghetto of Beresteczko that stinks of rotten herring (Berestechko nerushimo voniaet i do sikh por, ot vsekh liudei neset zapakhom gniloi seledki [2:70/162]). Jews and Poles live, or lived, together peacefully in Beresteczko; it is home not only to the ghetto but also to St. Valentine’s Church, with its absconded priest Tuzinkiewicz, who, we read, was ‘‘a good priest. When the inhabitants want us to grasp this, they say that the 162

At Home with Pani Eliza Jews loved him’’ (2:86/177). But the church, like the ghetto, is decaying; Liutov sees there ‘‘bits of rotting cotton wool’’ (kuski istlevshei vaty [2:88/180]). For Liutov, Beresteczko, both Polish and Jewish, is summed up in the ‘‘warm rot of antiquity’’ that he smells there (teplio gnil’iu stariny [2:70/161]); it is defined by what he calls, in the story ‘‘Gedali,’’ ‘‘the gentle odour of decay’’ (legkii zapakh tleniia [2:30/117]).6 Blindness, often of the old or otherwise infirm, also unites the Polish and Jewish characters. Babel’s childhood stories, most written within five years of Red Cavalry, are famously replete with the blind, most of whom possess, nonetheless, an inner sight. This is particularly true for the glasses-wearing narrator himself, who begins his life as a writer when, blinded by the guts of his pet doves that run down his face (oni tekli vdol’ shchek, izvivais’, bryzgaia i oslepliaia menia), so that he ‘‘closed his eyes so as not to see the world’’ (2:149/38). But the closed eyes see more, and this experience sets the young writer on a lifetime of observation and literary production. In Red Cavalry Gedali, the ‘‘diminutive shop owner’’ of the eponymous story in Red Cavalry, is one of the marketplace ‘‘Jews with the beards of prophets, with passionate rags on their sunken chests’’ (2:29/116). Characteristically he requires glasses, like Liutov himself, and again like the old landlady in ‘‘My First Goose,’’ who ‘‘raised the overflowing whites of her semi-blind eyes’’ to Liutov (2:33/121). This repellent description of diseased eyes is strikingly similar to that of the Polish wife of the old caretaker in ‘‘At St. Valentine’s,’’ whose ‘‘pupils were filled with the white moisture of blindness and spurted with tears’’ (2:87/78). It is amid the plundering of the St. Valentine Church that Liutov is confronted by this Polish woman with the moist white eyes of blindness. She grabs Liutov around the ankles, exactly as her husband, Pan Ludomirski, embraces the legs of a statue of Jesus on the very next page (2:88/181). The connection between Jesus and the Jewish Liutov is made explicit, as we are reminded several times by Pan Apolek’s portraits of the local Jews: ‘‘Pan Ludomirski’s Savior was a curly-headed Yid with a small, tufted beard and a low, wrinkled forehead (2:88/181). The weak-sighted Liutov then becomes the old woman’s own savior, for ‘‘returning to my quarters at the staff HQ, I wrote a report to the divisional commander about an affront to the religious feelings of the local population. The order was given for the church to be closed, and the guilty persons, having been subjected to a disciplinary inquiry, were consigned to the jurisdiction of a military tribunal’’ (2:89/181). Thus the blind and weaksighted, both Jewish and Polish, have apparently seen the truth of war and art alike.7 It is surely not coincidental that Liutov refers to his own imagination as ‘‘a happy, blind old woman’’ (voobrazhenie, schastlivaia slepaia baba).8 As old, infirm, malodorous, and otherwise unappealing his Polish characters and their environs may be, they provide the narrator, or rather the writer behind him, with the very stuff of his art. Indeed, their blindness and their smell connect them to his inner self. He is ‘‘at home’’ with them both. 163

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt The story ‘‘The Theory of the Tachanka’’ (‘‘Uchenie o tachanke’’) ends curiously, with the description of ruined Catholic churches, specifically: ‘‘In a niche that a shell has smashed, stands a brown statue of St. Ursula with bare, round arms. And ancient, narrow letters trace an uneven chain on the blackened gold of the pediment . . . ‘To the greater glory of Jesus and His Holy Mother.’ ’’ The final paragraph then switches from a description of the ruined Catholic shrine to the ruined Jewish homes and house of prayer that occupy the same land as the Poles: Lifeless Jewish shtetls cluster round the Polish manor-houses. [. . .] Concealed by a warren of hovels, a synagogue has squatted down on the destitute earth, eyeless [i.e., blind], gap-toothed, round as a Hassidic hat. [. . .] In their passionate features, painfully carved, there is no fat, or warm pulse of blood. The movements of the Volhynian and Galician Jew are unrestrained, abrupt, offensive to good taste, but the power of their grief is full of a gloomy grandeur and their secret contempt for the Polish pan is limitless. Looking at them, I have understood the fiery history of this outlying region, the stories that are told of Talmudists who were tenant landlords of taverns, rabbis who engaged in usury, girls who were raped by Polish troopers and on whose account Polish magnates shot themselves. (2:43/131)

In this brief description we see again a Polish-Jewish convergence for Babel: the smashed shrine/the smashed synagogue; the chiseled St. Ursula/ the chiseled old Jews, marble-like in their lack of warm blood; the intensity of love/the intensity of hate. For Babel in these stories, the lives of the Jews and the Poles of Galicia are intertwined in both passion and destruction.

Jews, Poles, and the Endurance of Culture Under the August 18 entry in his diary of 1920, Babel wrote how he met two handsome old maids, alarming how much they remind me of the Shapiro sisters from Nikolaev, two quiet, educated Galician women, patriots, their own culture, their bedroom, probably hair curlers, in this rumbling, roaring, embattled Milatyn, beyond these walls wagon trains, cannon, our fatherly commanders telling their tales of heroism, orange-colored dust, clouds of dust, the monastery is swathed in dust. The sisters offer me cigarettes, they breathe in my words about how splendid everything is going to be, it’s balm to them, they blossom, and suddenly we’re discussing cultural matters, like intellectuals. (1:415/72)

Babel’s experience of these two women, who oddly remind him of Jews he knows from Nikolaev, is one of the endurance of the everyday (represented by the hair curlers) and one of culture (‘‘like intellectuals’’). Similarly Babel writes on August 8: ‘‘Life goes on in the Jewish hovels—wretched, powerful, immortal—young women in white stockings, shifts’’ (1:405/60). On the previous day these Jewish women, or women like them, ‘‘listen to what’s said

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At Home with Pani Eliza about the Russian paradise, the international situation, the rising in India’’ (1:405/59). Like the Polish women, these Jews are able to continue their ordinary life despite the destruction around them—they are ‘‘immortal’’—and remain interested in the cultural world at large. For Babel, then, ‘‘I’m beginning to feel at home in this town,’’ and ‘‘I should like to stay here awhile and learn more’’ (1:405, 406/59, 60). None of these women from the diary accounts appears directly in the stories of Red Cavalry, but I would argue that the sense of ordinariness, of domesticity—hair curlers, white stockings—and of the endurance of culture that comfort Babel in the diary and make him feel ‘‘at home in this town’’ are transferred to the amber tea and biscuits that Pani Eliza serves Liutov while war wages outside the window. As he waits in the parsonage for the commissar to return from headquarters, Liutov spreads a lousy mattress to rest, and ‘‘place[s] beneath my head a folio in which is printed a poem to his excellency, the illustrious leader of the Polish nobility, Josef Pilsudski’’ (2:9/94). Again, Polish culture has been domesticated, made comfortable, or rather made to provide comfort for the Jewish protagonist. The diary records several experiences when Babel wanders through plundered Polish estates in Galicia. In each case, what attract him are the signs of historical gentility, tradition, art, and literature that remain: ‘‘I find ancient books, precious Latin manuscripts. [. . .] a varied collection of books, many in Latin. 1860 editions. That’s when Tuzinkiewicz [immortalized as the priest who fled Beresteczko dressed as a woman in ‘‘At St. Valentine’s’’] really lived, huge old-fashioned living quarters, dark pictures, photographs of church dignitaries assembled in Zhitomir, portraits of Pope Pius X, a nice face, an amazing portrait of Sienkiewicz—there he is, the essence of a nation’’ (1:404/57–58). About the sacked church: ‘‘a magnificent church, 200 years old, the things it’s seen (Tuzinkiewicz’s manuscripts, so many counts and serfs, magnificent Italian paintings, rosy priests rocking the infant Christ, a magnificent dark Christ, Rembrandt, a Madonna in the manner of Murillo, maybe it is a Murillo’’ (1:404/58). In the castle of the Counts Raciborowski: ‘‘Ancient, aristocratic Polish house, probably more than 100 years old, bright, old-fashioned paintings on the ceilings, remains of antlers, [. . .] a Steinway piano, sofas ripped open, springs sticking out, remember the doors, light white doors, oak doors, letters in French dated 1820, ‘notre petit héros achève 7 semaines.’ God, who can have written them, and when, these trampled letters, I pick up some relics, a century ago, the mother a countess, a Steinway, the park, an artificial lake. I can’t tear myself away’’ (1:404–405/58–59). Again and again the old and destroyed Polish artifacts that the writer turned Red Army propagandist encounters are described as infused with history and culture. Thus Babel meets the priest in ©aszków, and sees a portrait of Count Andrzej Szeptycki, Metropolitan of Galicia. A valiant magnate with a black ring on his large, aristocratic hand. The old priest has

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Judith Deutsch Kornblatt served 35 years in ©aszków, lower lip never stops trembling, tells me about Szeptycki who ‘‘wasn’t educated in the Polish spirit,’’ from a family of Ruthenian grandees, ‘‘the counts of Szeptycki,’’ who afterward went over to the Poles. [. . .] The priest’s old-world culture, quiet and assured. A nice intelligent priest who has laid in a supply of flour, some chickens, a hen, he wants to talk about universities, unlucky man, he has Apanasenko in his red Cossack coat living in the house. (1:408/62–63)

Babel has a similar experience of the encounter with culture in Stary Milatyn, and explicitly writes that he wants to remain in the ‘‘pleasant darkness’’ and ‘‘extraordinary fragran[ce]’’ of the Poles: The church, the Catholic priest’s apartment, the priest has a luxurious apartment, it’s unforgettable, he keeps shaking my hand every other minute, is on his way to bury a dead Pole, but sits down a bit, asks whether our commander is a good man, a typically Jesuitical face, clean-shaven, shifty gray eyes, says how good it all is, a tearful Polish woman, his niece, begs us to give her back her heifer, tears and a coquettish smile, all very Polish. Mustn’t forget the apartment, bric-a-brac, pleasant darkness, Jesuitical, Catholic culture, clean women and the extraordinarily fragrant, overanxious priest with monastery across the way. I want to stay on. (1:414–15/71–72)

Babel transformed these lived experiences with Poles as described in the diary and condensed the impressions of history and culture into a precious few lines in Red Cavalry, such as that in the story ‘‘Pan Apolek,’’ when Liutov sits in Pani Eliza’s kitchen, ‘‘where on scented evenings the shades of old feudal Poland gathered together’’ (2:19/105), and in the story ‘‘Beresteczko,’’ where ‘‘shoots that were over three centuries old still sprouted green in Volhynia from the warm rot of antiquity’’ (2:70/161). In ‘‘Beresteczko’’ Liutov roams through the ‘‘ravaged castle of the Counts Raciborski [only transparently altered from the actual Raciborowski estate described in the diary], the recent owners of Beresteczko’’ (2:70/162). There Liutov finds a century-old letter, the same letter that Babel had found in 1920, written in French on yellowed paper: ‘‘Berestetchko, 1820. Paul, mon bien aimé, on dit que l’empereur Napoléon est mort, est-ce vrai? Moi, je me sens bien, les couches ont été faciles, notre petit héros achève sept semaines.’’ With this reference to Napoleon, we are in the presence of history itself, written in the language of Western European culture, by someone who understands the delicate irony of valor: the seven-week-old ‘‘petit héros.’’ Babel contrasts this bit of century-old domestic heroism—the attainment of seven weeks of life by a fragile baby—with the ostensible ‘‘heroes’’ of his stories: the Russian Cossack warriors. As he reports in the diary, ‘‘the verger quivers like a bird, writhes, speaks a mixture of Russian and Polish, I’m not allowed to touch it [the statue of St. Valentine] he sobs. ‘They’re wild beasts, they’ve come to wreck and rob, it’s obvious, the old gods are being destroyed’ ’’ (1:404/58). What we come to realize through his encounters with the Poles is that the gods Babel invokes in both the diary and the stories are not 166

At Home with Pani Eliza so much in the heavens but in the rotting manuscripts, letters, and paintings that remain scattered on the floor.

The Wandering of Poland At the end of ‘‘Pan Apolek’’ Liutov takes leave of the painter and of Pan Robacki, the church’s lay-brother, to return to ‘‘my plundered Jews,’’ of whom we read in the first story of the cycle. As he walks from Pole to Jew, ‘‘a homeless moon was loitering about the town. And I strolled together with it, keeping warm within me unfulfillable dreams and out-of-tune songs’’ (2:25/111). The wandering moon echoes Liutov’s own homelessness during the Polish campaign and, perhaps, the ‘‘wandering’’ nature of all his exiled Jewish brethren. Location plays a large role in the short-story cycle; almost a third are titled with the names of towns or churches in towns, and Babel included place names at the end of many of the stories that do not have place indicators in the title: Novograd-Volynsk at the end of ‘‘Crossing the Zbrucz,’’ Belyov at the end of ‘‘The Konzapas’ Commander,’’ Brody at the end of ‘‘Kombrig 2,’’ and so forth. For Babel, character, place, and story are intertwined, and Babel’s experiences of people are always also experiences of place: he analyzes the Cossacks of Kuban as opposed to those of the Don, and compares the Jews of Poland to those of his hometown, Odessa; he is curious about the Galicians; he writes of the church in Novograd, the church in Beresteczko, of the cemetery in Kozin. In 1920, when Babel traveled with the Red Cavalry into what he refers to in the diary repeatedly as Galicia, the name for a part of partitioned Poland that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he entered a multinational, multiethnic, multireligious territory that had only recently come to be called, again, Poland, and that only tenuously. Most of the people he met must have spoken Ukrainian or Yiddish, and sometimes Czech. This is clear in the diary, although not so much so in the stories. Actual Polish encounters were probably a rarity. But the Poles whom Babel might have met, nonetheless, felt that the land on which he trod was their home. The eastern frontier of the Polish Empire until the partitions in the late eighteenth century ran up from the Dniester River, south and even east of Kiev, then skirted just to the west of Kiev and traveled north past Smolensk. Only then did it head westward through what we know now as Latvia, all the way to the Baltic Sea. This is to say that Poland, before the partitions, extended quite far eastward, covering much of what we now call Ukraine and Belarus’. After the partitions, the geographic area was divided among the empires of Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Germany. Unlike other Eastern and Central Europeans, the Poles of the eastern area, in particular, firmly fought assimilation; they did not acculturate in any way to the new dominant culture in the Russian Empire. Instead, they continued to see Poland, and only Poland, as their home.9 During the First World War, Poles were forced to fight Poles as they were conscripted into the Russian, Austrian, and German armies. At the end of the 167

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt Poland-Lithuania's Eastern Frontier 1667-1772 Congress Kingdom 1815-1874 Curzon Line July 11, 1920 Polish-Soviet Frontier Treaty of Riga 1921-1939

R U

S L A T V I A

S I A

LITHUANIA

Smolensk

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SEA

C LTI BA

R

U

KALININGRAD OBLAST

D

GERMANY

A

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N

A

E

B

Warszawa

L

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O Kozin Brody

L'viv

V A K I A S L O

I A

R M

I A

O

L

R O M A N I A

A

R Y G A N U H

V

S

E N

O

U

K

Zhytomyr

D

A

T

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Kiev

Slucz Zbrucz

ECH CZ PUBLIC RE

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Novograd Volynsk

Beresteczko Dubno

Changing Polish frontiers.

war, in 1918, the Central Powers signed a peace treaty with Russia at BrestLitovsk, but Poland remained unrestored and unrecognized. Jozef Pilsudski took advantage of the collapse of authority later that year and declared an independent Poland, but it took until December 1919, just months before the Soviet-Polish campaign, before the Supreme Allied Council proposed a new, provisional Polish frontier, called the Curson Line. This frontier was extended farther south across Galicia in July 1920, during the fighting Babel describes, and thus gave some international legitimacy once more to an independent Polish political homeland. But this political frontier ran much to the west of where Babel’s stories take place, closer to the boundary of the much smaller Tsarist Kingdom of Poland of imperial times, sometimes called ‘‘Congress Poland.’’ The action of Red Cavalry takes place neither in the Kingdom of Poland nor within the 1919–20 proposed expansion of the frontier to the Curzon Line. In fact, despite a popular translation of the first story as ‘‘Crossing into 168

At Home with Pani Eliza Poland’’ (actually ‘‘Crossing the Zbrucz’’ [‘‘Perekhod cherez Zbruch’’]), from the official Russian perspective Babel had no reason in the spring of 1920 to call the territory on which Liutov stands after crossing the Zbrucz ‘‘Poland,’’ except for the important fact that the Poles continued to call it that.10 What is particularly curious about this first story, ‘‘Crossing the Zbrucz,’’ is that Novograd, where it and the next story (‘‘The Catholic Church in Novograd’’) take place, is not, by any means, located on the Zbrucz, the river Liutov presumably crossed to get there. For some reason, for the purposes of the shortstory cycle, Babel moved the town westward. But why? The town is located on another river, the S™ucz, and Babel could have had his Cossack division cross there, it would seem, to the same metaphoric effect. He could have still played on the pregnant images of transition, of entrance, of crossing, as of the River Styx. But by moving the town to the western bank of a river that did, indeed, mark a Polish frontier, but only later, after the Treaty of Riga in March 1921, Babel instead seriously complicates any reading of geography, and national politics, that might explain the contents of the stories we are about to read. What he does, on the first page of his short-story cycle, is to raise the question of what is, indeed, home for the Poles. The boundaries of that home, that is, the political authority over it, ‘‘wandered’’ for years. It is probably no accident that Pani Eliza’s kitchen is not really hers but that of the absconded priest, or, really, of the Catholic Church. Pan Ludomirski and his wife, as well, are caretakers in St. Valentine’s, not owners. Even Pan Apolek has a place to sleep only on the invitation of others. In fact, the Polish characters we meet in the stories are technically squatters. Those who had a somewhat more legitimate claim to the homes they inhabit have fled: Tuzinkiewicz, the Counts Raciborski. But even their assertion of the Polishness of their land would have been challenged by the ruling powers of their earlier days. Despite the fact that those who remained to be met by Liutov in the stories have not moved, the governance and official name of the land they inhabit has been constantly in flux. Babel must have been fascinated with the irony; the Jews have no land and constantly wander (as he continues to do throughout both the diary and as Liutov does in the stories—from charred and plundered town to town to town), while the Poles sit quietly on the land of their ancestors, in their very own kitchens, and cannot say accurately where they are. ‘‘Ill-fated Galicia,’’ Babel writes in his diary on August 26, ‘‘ill-fated Jews’’ (1:422/82). ‘‘My thoughts of home are more and more insistent,’’ he writes a week and a half later. ‘‘I cannot see where it will end’’ (1:431/94). The Polish characters that Babel describes in Red Cavalry inhabit this ill-fated Galicia, and share the ill and wandering fate of the Jews. Their homes are overrun, their cultural artifacts are scattered on the floor,11 their land is not theirs. And yet they survive. Liutov’s encounters with Poles present the reader with the memory of stability and domestic comfort in a modern world of war and revolution, a world in which the lyrical writer must now work hard to remain. In the 169

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt quotation from the diary above, Babel longs to go home. But the poignant truth he sees with his weak-sighted eyes is that he no longer has a childhood home to which he can return. Not only has he outgrown his schoolboy dreams of a dovecote, but the Russia of his youth is now the Soviet Union, and his Odessa of childlike fantasy is retreating ever more quickly into myth. As a Soviet writer, he must now negotiate the frontiers between new enemies and new friends, only some of whom offer him the comforts, and the culture, of home. Babel must have moved the ancient Polish/Galician/Imperial Russian/newly Soviet/ Ukrainian Novograd from the Slucz to the Zbrucz River to remind his readers that place and security—not only for the Poles and the Jews, but for everyone in the contemporary and often crass world ‘‘order’’—has been seriously disrupted. We can retrieve it only in the odd aroma of amber tea and biscuits, served on others’, even enemies’, dishes by a warm, but querulous stove. NOTES 1. Isaak Babel’, Sochineniia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991). All quotations from Babel’s writing will be cited from this edition, and indicated in the text with volume and page number. Translations from the stories are occasionally modified from Isaac Babel, Collected Stories, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin, 1994), with page number indicated in the text following the original. Translations from the diary are taken from Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, ed. Carol J. Avins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and similarly indicated in the text. 2. This is counter to the assessment of Edyta M. Bojanowska in ‘‘E Pluribus Unum: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry as a Story Cycle,’’ Russian Review 59 (July 2000): 375, where the author speaks of the ‘‘jaundiced Bolshevik clichés’’ that Liutov uses to describe the Poles. 3. Babel might have been doubling a single one of his own experiences in Polish Galicia, described in his diary (1:404/57–58), when he hears of the missing priest in Beresteczko. There is no reference in the diary to a similarly ‘‘absconded’’ priest in Novograd-Volynsk nor to a housekeeper by the name of Eliza. The doubling, as well as the creation of a pani, suggests a literary or thematic significance beyond mere reportage or perhaps both. 4. I am included in this group, with a chapter on Babel in The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 107–25. See also Efraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution: Writers and Artists between Hope and Apostasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71–111; and idem, ‘‘The ‘Jewish Cossack’: Isaac Babel in the First Red Cavalry,’’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry 4 (1988): 113–34; Patricia Carden, The Art of Isaac Babel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), 102–106, 127–32; and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 70–106. Most famously, see Lionel Trilling’s introduction to the first English translation of Babel’s stories (1955), reprinted as an appendix in Collected Stories, 339–64. Finally, in ‘‘Kinship and Concealment in Red Cavalry and Babel’s 1920 Diary,’’ Carol J. Avins discusses Babel’s sense of his Jewishness among both the Jews and Cossacks (Slavic Review 53, no. 3 [fall 1994]: 694–710).

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At Home with Pani Eliza 5. Carol J. Avins, ‘‘Introduction: Isaac Babel’s ‘Red Cavalry’ Diary,’’ in Babel, 1920 Diary, xliv. 6. Another character shares this smell with the Poles and Jews: Sashka, the regimental nurse. She breathes in the ‘‘deathly aroma of brocade, of scattered flowers, of fragrant putrefaction’’ from the plundered church, and she herself is desecrated by the Cossacks, making her one with the oddly attractive smells (of death and flowers) around her: ‘‘Sashka’s body, blooming and stinking like the flesh of a cow that has been slaughtered, was bared’’ (2:87/179). In this case a caretaker, although not Polish, shares in the imagery. As a female in the army, she, like Liutov, is an outsider, a victim, and, indeed, a wanderer. Her role, like Pani Eliza’s, is also domestic. 7. It is true that Pan Apolek is not referred to as blind, despite the fact that he apparently sees the inner truth of his subjects, and draws the admiration of Liutov. Perhaps actual lack of sight would have been too great an infirmity for a painter, and this might be a reason that he is accompanied in his wanderings by the blind singer, Gottfried. For a less positive, but intriguing interpretation of Apolek, see Robert A. Maguire, ‘‘Ikphrasis in Isaak Babel,’’ in Depictions: Slavic Studies in the Narrative and Visual Arts in Honor of William E. Harkins, ed. Douglas M. Greenfield (Dana Print, Calif.: Ardis, 2000), 14–23. 8. This line exists in the original version of ‘‘The Sun of Italy,’’ published under the title ‘‘Sidorov,’’ in Iz knigi Konarmiia, published in Krasnaia nov’ 3, no. 20 (April– May 1924): 8. It is missing in later editions but was restored by the translator of Collected Stories as ‘‘a blind and happy old hag’’ (112). It is not entirely clear why Babel removed these words from his collected edition of the stories. 9. For information on the Polish-Soviet War, as well as on Galicia, particularly the Jews and Poles of Galicia, see Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The PolishSoviet War, 1919–20 (London: MacDonald, 1972); Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 12: Focusing on Galicia: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, 1772–1918, ed. Israel Bartal and Antony Polonsky (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999); ibid., Vol. 8: Jews in Independent Poland: 1918–1939, ed. Antony Polonsky, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Jerzy Tomaszewski (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994); Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). 10. Indeed, many of the towns he describes were not at all Polish but rather were predominantly Jewish: In 1896 the 15,308 inhabitants of Novograd-Volynsk were divided as follows: 8,275 Jews, 5,218 Orthodox, 1,412 Catholics, 175 Old Believers, 38 Protestants, and 90 other believers. See the entry ‘‘Novograd-Volynsk,’’ in F. A. Brokgaus and I. A. Efron’, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (St. Petersburg: Tipo-litografiia I. A. Efrona, 1897), 21:264. 11. We are reminded of the Passover dishes of the Jews, the ‘‘broken shards of the sacred vessels’’ in the first story that Liutov finds scattered across the floor along with ‘‘scraps of women’s fur coats, pieces of excrement’’ (2:6/92).

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eleven

Soviet Polonophobia and the Formulation of Nationalities Policy in the Ukrainian SSR, ∞Ω≤π–∞Ω≥∂ Matthew D. Pauly

The Soviet Union and the Polish Republic clashed almost at birth. The 1920 war fought between them produced a climate of hostility and suspicion that continued through the interwar period. For the Soviet Union, talk of a Polish attack on the border republic of Ukraine was to have a lasting impact on internal events. During this time Soviet rhetoric, if not real fear of such a confrontation, justified and motivated the gradual transformation of Soviet nationalities policy for Ukraine. This process culminated in a November 1933 resolution of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet Communist Party, which, for the first time, declared that ‘‘local Ukrainian nationalism, allied with imperialist interventionism, represents the chief danger in Ukraine.’’1 The Soviet Union’s own ‘‘Polonophobia’’ played a key role in the formulation of this new canon. Party leaders argued that ‘‘fascist’’ Poland was aiding nationalists within the Ukrainian republic in preparation for an imperialist attack on Soviet territory. The Soviet encounter with Poland during these years helped to hasten an end to ukrainizatsiia, the liberal nationalities policy the party believed had allowed these nationalists to emerge, and paved the way for the development 172

Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR of a particular sort of Soviet patriotic identity. Although this Soviet patriotic identity, gradually infused with strains of Russian nationalism, did not coalesce until the late 1930s, its orientation was clear. The possibility of war meant that Soviet citizens had to demonstrate complete loyalty. Even the appearance of a variant national identity could not be permitted. Ukrainians, Russians, and other nationalities alike had to stand in defense of one heroic, proletarian homeland: the Soviet Union. This essay will primarily utilize evidence from diplomatic correspondence and the Soviet press to demonstrate that through the 1920s the Soviet Union exhibited a persistent concern for the security of its Ukrainian republic. This concern provides an important yet understudied rationale for the shifts in Soviet nationalities policy well documented by other scholars. Fear of an attack by Poland motivated the regimentation of Ukrainian society around a supranational Soviet patriotism first articulated during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 and validated the party’s struggle against Ukrainian national identification. This essay maintains that the war scare of 1926–27 supplied the Soviet government with a precedent for manipulating foreign policy concerns for domestic ends and furnished a logic for the party’s transformation of nationalities policy. It then examines a series of less well-known crises in Polish-Soviet relations to demonstrate how a rhetoric of Polonophobia influenced the character of repression in Soviet Ukraine in three instances: the show trial of the so-called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the party censure of the Ukrainian Commissar of Education, Mykola Skrypnyk, and the eventual purge of the Ukrainian branch of the Communist Party.

Defending the Homeland: The Polish-Soviet War of ∞Ω≤≠ Conflict between Poland and Soviet Russia was almost inevitable. The German army’s withdrawal from its eastern front at the end of World War I created a political vacuum in a vast territory that both countries claimed as their own: present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Scholars have debated the sincerity and nature of Poland’s much touted plans for federal ties with these ‘‘borderlands.’’ More or less indisputable is that Poland’s commander-in-chief, Marshal Józef Pi™sudski, viewed Russian domination of these territories as an impermissible threat to Poland’s long-term security. 2 Under his orders, Polish troops succeeded in expelling the Soviet Western Army from Wilno (Vilnius) in April 1919 and from Minsk in August. Pi™sudski, however, worried that the Soviet government would eventually seek to retake these cities and expand its control over the large territory that constituted ethnic Ukraine once it had defeated its internal White enemies.3 In reality, the intentions of Soviet Russia were fluid and, consequently, less clear. There was considerable disagreement within the Communist movement about the wisdom of striking into the heart of Poland itself. Those who believed that the survival of the Russian Revolution depended on its spread across national lines into Europe’s industrialized west, 173

Matthew D. Pauly saw an attack on Poland as inevitable. But this was not the dominant position in the Russian Bolshevik Party, and, for a time, the Soviet government engaged the Poles in a series of protracted but ultimately futile negotiations for a ceasefire.4 The Bolshevik government remained ever suspicious of its western neighbor. It gradually became convinced that Great Britain and France, having failed to defeat the Red Army through direct intervention in Russia, were seeking its overthrow by prodding the Poles toward war.5 The Soviets built up their forces on their western front but simultaneously instructed Polish Communists to launch a domestic peace campaign. Labor strikes, meant to bolster Communist propaganda against saber-rattling, only vexed the Polish government and gave rise to new fears of Soviet-sponsored revolt. The Red Army’s victories over the White general Anton Denikin exacerbated Polish concerns. Pi™sudski decided to undertake what he viewed as a preemptive strike against Soviet forces to protect the gains his army had made. Russia must be pushed back to its ethnic borders, he calculated, if Poland had any hope of permanently protecting its sovereignty. Pi™sudski hastily concluded an alliance with Symon Petliura, leader of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Denikin had pushed Petliura’s forces out of Right Bank Ukraine in the fall of 1919, and Petliura had little option but to seek refuge in Poland. By agreeing to join forces with Poland, Petliura gave up Ukrainian claims to the Polish-occupied province of Eastern Galicia and alienated the Galician contingent of his steadily shrinking army.6 Whether Petliura brought any military benefit to the alliance is a subject of debate.7 The agreement, however, was of critical symbolic importance because it demonstrated Polish support for Ukrainian nationalism and offered a precedent for future Soviet suspicions of Polish intrigue in Ukraine. Polish and Ukrainian troops did succeed in capturing Kiev in May 1920, but the Red Army’s counterattack was swift and Poland itself only narrowly escaped Soviet occupation It was during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 that the Bolsheviks began to employ a hybridized version of Soviet patriotism. In an April 29 proclamation, the party’s Central Committee appealed not just to the workers of the Soviet Union but to all ‘‘honorable citizens of Rossiia,’’ warning that they could not allow ‘‘the bayonets of the Polish lords to determine the will of the Great Russian nation.’’8 The party’s invocation of Russian nationalism was tempered by the KP(b)U’s recognition that the Polish invasion immediately threatened a Ukrainian ‘‘homeland.’’9 Union publications, however, continued to rally the country to the defense of Russian lands, subordinating Ukraine to this larger territorial understanding. David Brandenberger stresses that in the 1920s Soviet sloganeering avoided appeals to a homeland: ‘‘It was, rather, internationalist, proletarian solidarity forming the essence of Soviet social identity and not national borders or blood.’’10 This, in fact, was not always the case. The 1920 Polish invasion compelled the party to make a momentary appeal to national blood. More important, it introduced a lasting notion of an expansive ‘‘home174

Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR land,’’ defined by the borders of Russia’s imperial past and constructed in opposition to the hostile forces surrounding it. It was a proletarian homeland first and foremost, devoid at times of national categories but, when necessary, encompassing them in a supranational package. The Red Army’s attempt to expand this territory westward in 1920 was permissible. It could not, however, allow the homeland to contract.

The ∞Ω≤∏–≤π War Scare and Shumskyism The events culminating in the 1926–27 war scare are well known.11 In May 1926, Pi™sudski staged a coup d’état in Poland. The Soviet press maintained that Pi™sudski had seized power in order to launch yet another new attack on Soviet territory. At this time Soviet relations with Britain also took a turn for the worse. In May, the British government broke relations with the country to protest the Soviet Trade Union Council’s public support for striking British coal miners. Soon afterward, in Poland, a White Russian émigré succeeded in assassinating the Soviet ambassador, Petr Voikov. In China the Soviet-supported Kuomintang turned on their former Communist allies, putting an end to hopes for a socialist anticolonial revolution in the Far East. From the Soviet perspective, the world was turning increasingly hostile. Concern about Joseph Stalin’s management of foreign relations and general leadership of the Soviet Union mounted. An opposition bloc within the party, led by Leon Trotsky, argued that Stalin’s earlier policy of accommodation with reformist foreign governments had placed the country in a precarious position.12 Stalin, in turn, denounced the opposition’s divisive tactics, arguing in favor of unequivocal party unity. Although Stalin’s faction ultimately triumphed and he moved quickly to suppress any further dissent, Soviet leaders continued to worry about threats from abroad. Soviet diplomats spoke in particular about the creation of a new antiSoviet coalition headed by Britain and Poland. A report by the British Foreign Office told of efforts that the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Georgii Chicherin, had made to persuade governments abroad that Britain was guiding Poland and other Eastern European states against the Soviet Union.13 According to Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, Chicherin, was convinced that, ‘‘encouraged by the rupture of diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Russia, Pi™sudski would . . . engineer some frontier incident and make it an excuse for war, the object of which would be to annex Lithuania, and Little and White Russia [Ukraine and Belarus].’’14 The Soviet government thus considered Poland to be at the forefront of a conspiracy directed at the Soviet Union, more specifically at Ukraine and other border areas. Maksim Litvinov, Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs at the time, warned in a note to the Polish minister in Moscow that the Soviet government ‘‘is compelled to regard the murder of its representative in Warsaw not as the act of a madman but as one manifestation of the systematic and 175

Matthew D. Pauly organized struggle against the USSR.’’15 Although he did not directly implicate the Polish government, he suggested that Warsaw had facilitated Voikov’s assassination by harboring anti-Soviet groups. Soviet relations with Poland had been far from amicable ever since the Polish-Soviet war. However, in 1927, these relations fell to a new low. Alfred Meyer writes that the war scare was ‘‘essentially a phony issue, manipulated by politicians in the course of a factional struggle in the ruling Communist party.’’16 Although Pi™sudski had made no secret of his long held ideas on the incorporation of Ukraine and Belarus into a Polish federation, Poland was not militarily prepared for a new war against the Soviet Union nor was Britain actively interested in one. As Meyer points out, panic over the likelihood of war disappeared more quickly than it arose. If the war scare was manufactured, its consequences were unanticipated. Brandenberger maintains that the rumors of war in 1927 failed to mobilize the Soviet population to the party’s side: ‘‘Instead of promoting an upswing of popular support for the regime, the war scare gave rise to defeatist rumors that swept across the entire country.’’17 Antagonistic attitudes were apparently so widespread that the party ordered an end to talk of war. But Stalin and his supporters in the party learned from the campaign: a state threatened with war could ill afford a diversity of expression; its preservation depended on the solidarity of its leadership and citizens in the struggle ahead. Ukrainian talk of a distinct path to socialism, even when carefully framed, smacked of the very sort of disloyalty that the Soviet secret police was reporting as endemic. Rhetoric of fear of foreign intervention could be used for the transformation of nationalities policy in Ukraine with less worry. The party could identify and separate the nationalist ‘‘enemy’’ unambiguously from the general population. Arguments stressing the necessity of Soviet unity, under the banner of a supranational Soviet patriotism, justified the homogenization of culture and politics eventually approved by the party by the end of 1933. Soviet patriotism would not acquire a Russocentric character until later, but in 1927 the party moved quickly to minimize other competing national categories. The fight against Oleksandr Shumskyi and ‘‘Shumskyism’’ prefigured much of what was to come. As Commissar of Education for Soviet Ukraine, Shumskyi had defended proponents of the expansion of ukrainizatsiia. This policy mandated the expanded use of Ukrainian in the Ukrainian SSR and the promotion of ethnic Ukrainians in the party, government, and labor unions. Some Ukrainian intellectuals sought to direct this policy, designed to further the Sovietization of Ukrainian society, toward the development of a socialist, but distinctly Ukrainian, culture. This vision was fundamentally antithetical to the emerging notion of Soviet patriotism. Although the party in the 1920s saw the development of a Ukrainian national culture as integral to the construction of socialism in the republic, this culture could never assume preeminence over the supranational, Soviet identity. Furthermore, even at this time, any

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Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR move away from Ukraine’s historical ties with Russia was impermissible. A move toward Poland, real or alleged, was anathema. In the summer of 1926, the KP(b)U Central Committee criticized Shumskyi for defending Ukrainian intellectuals who had argued for the distancing of Ukrainian culture from Russian influence. After a series of such criticisms, in March 1927 a plenum of the Central Committee forced Shumskyi to step down from his post as commissar and recommended transferring him outside Ukraine. Karlo Maksymovych, the Western Ukrainian Communist Party (KPZU) delegate to the plenum, spoke against Shumskyi’s demotion and argued that these measures only harmed the standing of the Communist Party among Ukrainians in Poland and benefited Ukrainian nationalists and Polish ‘‘fascists.’’18 Maksymovych’s defense of Shumskyi led to a split within the KPZU when Maksymovych and his majority faction unsuccessfully protested to the Comintern regarding the KP(b)U’s treatment of Shumskyi. It seems likely that the 1927 war scare contributed partly to the actions and rhetoric that surrounded this incident, just as later war threats would influence the future approach of the KP(b)U to ukrainizatsiia within Soviet Ukraine. Immediately after Maksymovych’s defense of Shumskyi, the Polish Communist Party issued a declaration denouncing Maksymovych’s stance and warning that it aided Pi™sudski’s policy in Western Ukraine, a policy ‘‘which is dictated in full force against the USSR and which covers up the preparation for war against the Soviet Union under the flag of a real ‘independent’ Ukraine.’’19 On June 7, the KP(b)U’s Central Committee adopted a resolution accusing the KPZU of reaching a compromise with the Polish ruling classes and working against the interests of the workers and peasants.20 After initial attempts to resolve the dispute, the Comintern effectively ostracized the KPZU pro-Shumskyi majority.

New Tensions with Poland and the Show Trial of the ‘‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’’ In the years that followed, the Soviet government continued to worry about possible Polish designs on Soviet territory and support of anti-Soviet, Ukrainian nationalist activities. In May 1928, another attempt was made on the life of a Soviet representative in Poland, A. S. Lizarev. In a note of protest to the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Chicherin maintained that ‘‘Poland has thus become the scene of a terrorist struggle directed against the Soviet Union by émigré organizations which are getting assistance and financial support from obscure sources.’’21 Chicherin called upon the Polish government to take immediate action against such groups. Soviet diplomats also expressed repeated concern regarding the activities of the Ukrainian nationalists on Polish territory. In May 1929, the Soviet ambassador in Poland protested to the Polish government regarding the pres-

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Matthew D. Pauly ence of Polish officials at a requiem for the vilified enemy of the Soviet state, Symon Petliura.22 The ambassador maintained that the requiem was organized by Ukrainian nationalists as a demonstration of their determination to recapture Soviet Ukraine and that, in particular, the presence of the head of Poland’s Eastern Department of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs could be seen as ‘‘a hostile act regarding relations with the Soviet Union.’’ He further argued that the attendance of Polish officials ‘‘testifies to the full sympathy of the Polish government with objectives pursued by the Ukrainian émigrés.’’ Clearly the Soviet Union was growing more apprehensive about Polish intentions toward Soviet Ukraine. On November 4, 1929, the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia spoke of attempts by Polish ‘‘fascists’’ to incite the country into war with the Soviet Union: ‘‘The orientation toward war with the USSR has always been an integral part of the Pi™sudski group’s program. In this way, Polish fascism strives for the realization of its old plan.’’23 Fear of a conflict with Poland was again to influence domestic events in Soviet Ukraine. In May 1929, the Ukrainian secret police (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, or GPU) had already begun rounding up members of a fictional ‘‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’’ (or SVU, Spilka vyzvolennia Ukrainy). Rumors of foreign support for the supposed nationalist organization spread. In late February 1930, the Polish ambassador in Moscow expressed concern to the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs about a report that prosecutors had accused Serhii Iefremov, the alleged leader of the SVU and a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, of maintaining connections with the Polish and German consulates in Kiev.24 The evidence presented at the SVU trial further implicated Poland for allegedly supporting the Ukrainian nationalists. The Polish ambassador objected particularly to the testimony of Andrii Nikovskyi, a Ukrainian writer and former member of the Petliura government, who spoke of Polish cooperation in a planned assault on Soviet Ukraine.25 Soviet prosecutors utilized forced confessions and largely fabricated evidence in order to discredit the accused and establish their relationship with anti-Soviet governments.26 They charged SVU leaders with planning to coordinate an armed uprising in Ukraine with a Polish-led intervention. At different points in the trial, the prosecution claimed that the SVU was plotting everything from the establishment of a bourgeois Ukrainian republic to a merger with ‘‘fascist’’ Poland to a Polish-German partition of Ukraine.27 The SVU supposedly maintained dozens of local cells throughout Ukraine in order to prepare for a 1931 anti-Soviet revolt. The SVU show trial was essentially aimed at the Ukrainian national intelligentsia, the most vocal advocates of ukrainizatsiia and possible front of opposition to the process of collectivization then under way in Ukraine.28 However, according to historian Hiroaki Kuromiya, the threat from Poland provided an essential rationale for their suppression: ‘‘the trial was developed in order to discredit ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ and to present them as hirelings of the Polish capitalists and szlachta.’’29 The Soviet press had repeatedly presented the Pol178

Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR ish danger to the public and now the government sought to use Polonophobic language to justify its maturing hard-line nationalities policy in Ukraine. Cooperation with Poland represented the basest act of disloyalty a Ukrainian Soviet citizen could perform. By tainting Ukrainian national expression with the brush of pro-Polish collusion, Soviet authorities further solidified the notion of a Soviet patriotism devoid of national emphasis. It is also possible that the Soviet authorities in Moscow genuinely feared war with Poland and thus sought to regiment Soviet Ukraine for the coming fight. While the trial against Iefremov and the other alleged members of the SVU was under way, Litvinov, who had succeeded Chicherin as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, reported to the Polish ambassador in Moscow that three Polish planes had been spotted deep over Ukrainian territory in March 1930.30 He argued that an ongoing anti-Soviet press campaign in Poland gave the Soviet Union real cause for suspicion. According to Litvinov, the Polish papers were replete with rumors of a possible preventive war against the Soviet Union. An Izvestiia article of March 18 warned of the provocation of the Polish press and underscored Pi™sudski’s willingness to lead a ‘‘crusade’’ against the Soviet Union.31 Fear of war reached such heights that the Polish foreign minister, August Zaleski, was eventually forced to publicly deny any Polish preparations for such an operation.32 Matters took a turn for the worse when a bomb was discovered in the Soviet Embassy in Poland. This incident led to a series of conversations between the representatives of the Soviet and Polish governments.33 The Soviets insisted that the Poles were not taking strict enough measures to find those responsible and that their delay encouraged the growth of anti-Soviet terrorist groups seeking to provoke war. An Izvestiia article of May 1 described Poland as ‘‘the most important point for the application of forces acting against the USSR.’’34 On June 13, Stamoniakov, an officer at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, reported that an editorial in Gazeta Polska, described by him as a semiofficial organ of the Polish government, had argued for the creation of a buffer Ukrainian state as a launching point for the eventual invasion of the Soviet Union.35 Stamoniakov claimed that those responsible for the terrorist attempt on the Soviet Embassy had influence over the Polish government and might succeed in inciting a rupture in Polish-Soviet relations. The crisis eventually passed, although in August of that year the head of the Press Section of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs still spoke of the possibility of war with a ‘‘madman like Pi™sudski’’ in control of Poland.36 While Poland and the Soviet Union were arguing over the likelihood of armed conflict between them, Poland was preoccupied with terrorist activities of Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia. In the spring and summer of 1930 the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) began a new campaign of sabotage and ‘‘expropriations’’ directed against Polish governmental institutions. It also unleashed a wave of terror against the ‘‘enemies of Ukraine,’’ a 179

Matthew D. Pauly category that included both Polish and Soviet officials, as well as Ukrainian collaborators. An OUN assassination attempt on the Soviet consul in Lwów (Lviv) in April 1930 failed owing to the intervention of the Polish police.37 Numerous incidents of vandalism occurred on the estates of Polish landlords in Galicia.38 The Polish government responded with a ‘‘pacification’’ campaign in areas where OUN attacks had occurred.39 Soviet authorities viewed this OUN terrorism with considerable apprehension. Their actions against the Ukrainian intelligentsia reflected in part their determination to prevent the development of a similarly virulent nationalist movement on Soviet soil. In order to popularize the Soviet cause in Galicia, the Soviet government sought to denounce the Polish ‘‘pacification’’ campaigns while simultaneously discrediting the western Ukrainian nationalists. In a bit of wordplay, it argued that the Poles were repressing the true socialist aspirations of the western Ukrainian people and labeled the OUN a lackey of the Polish ‘‘fascists.’’ The same Izvestiia article of March 18 that spoke of the Polish press’s agitation for an anti-Soviet war also talked of an alliance between the OUN and ‘‘fascist Pi™sudski followers.’’40 The article further contended that the Ukrainian nationalists were falsely trying to represent themselves as ‘‘fighters for the liberation of the Ukrainian people’’ by denouncing the Soviet proceedings against the SVU. In western Ukraine, concern about the appeal of the OUN’s call for the ‘‘reunification’’ of Ukraine forced the Communist Party there to drop all references to a merger of Galicia with Soviet Ukraine.41

Another Danger Identified and Skrypnyk’s Fall Relations between Poland and the Soviet Union stabilized to a manageable level of tension by the end of 1931. Talks began between Poland and the Soviet Union on a bilateral nonaggression pact. The Poles had repeatedly resisted Soviet offers for such a pact, but they had grown more apprehensive about revisionist tendencies in Germany and France’s apparent retreat from its commitment to Polish security.42 Lengthy negotiations led Poland to sign an agreement in November 1932 renouncing any territorial designs on the Soviet Union. Relations between Poland and the Soviet Union thereafter significantly improved. The Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, reported to the British ambassador in Warsaw on the almost complete disappearance of antiPolish propaganda in the Soviet press.43 Litvinov informed French reporters that the pact represented a ‘‘great blow’’ to the plans of foreign interventionists.44 For a time Soviet fears of Poland seemed to have significantly abated. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union still had reason to worry about its security and, in particular, the security of its Ukrainian republic. Nazi electoral victories in Germany in March 1932 and Hindenburg’s agreement to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933 provided fresh concerns. Almost immediately after the Nazi Party’s assumption of power, Litvinov called attention to 180

Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR the party’s anticommunist activities and the close association of its specialist on foreign affairs, Alfred Rosenberg, with Ukrainian émigrés ‘‘who were agitating for the detachment of Ukraine from the Soviet Union.’’45 In March, Pravda published an editorial that reported on Rosenberg’s plans to annex Soviet Ukraine and create a ‘‘federative Lithuanian-Belorussian-Ukrainian state.’’46 Four days later, the newspaper wrote of Hermann Göring’s request to the French ambassador for aid in annexing Ukraine and exchanging it with the Poles for the Polish corridor.47 In spite of Hitler’s public assurances that Germany was still committed to friendly relations with the Soviet Union, the Soviet government remained suspicious. The prospect of a German-Polish rapprochement was a particular concern, especially after the Polish ambassador and Hitler met in May and pledged their commitment to peace between them. In May, Karl Radek, a leading party commentator on foreign affairs, argued in Pravda that imperialist revisionism of the Versailles system would ultimately lead to war in Europe and an attack on the Soviet Union.48 A letter from the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the Soviet ambassador in Poland, urged him to report on the ‘‘aspiration of adventurous Pi™sudski circles to make use of a possible war between Japan and us and of [their] support for Hitler’s Germany.’’49 Rumors regarding Nazi plans for the annexation of Ukraine and a possible German-Polish alliance likely quickened the pace of repression in Ukraine. Arrests of members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia continued unabated. Germany’s aggressive rhetoric and a persistent fear of Polish expansion influenced the language of this new campaign against so-called local nationalism and justified the repressive measures taken by the party and secret police. Now Moscow moved to discredit proponents of ukrainizatsiia within the Ukrainian branch of the Communist Party itself. Moscow’s initial target was Mykola Skrypnyk, the Ukrainian Commissar of Education who had earlier led the campaign against Shumskyi but remained an active supporter of the expanded use of the Ukrainian language. In December 1932, the union Central Committee ordered a purge of all party branches. In Ukraine the purge led to the demotion or expulsion of many of Skrypnyk’s supporters within the party. In June 1933, KP(b)U Second Secretary Pavel Postyshev denounced Skrypnyk at a plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee. He argued that, under Skrypnyk’s leadership, ‘‘ukrainizatsiia gradually came into the hands of assorted Petliura riff-raff ’’ and that these people were working with Ukrainian nationalist organizations abroad to sell Ukraine to ‘‘the German fascists and Polish pany.’’50 Pravda warned that Petliura followers, foreign agents, and counterrevolutionaries had infiltrated all spheres of Ukrainian cultural life. The party admonished Soviet patriots to be on guard against Ukrainian nationalists supported by the long hand of Poland. At a party meeting a few days later, Postyshev renewed his attack: ‘‘The enemy is hiding behind the back of Comrade Skrypnyk.’’51 Andrii Khvylia, head of the party’s propaganda section, then rose to denounce Skrypnyk’s 1928 181

Matthew D. Pauly orthography for Ukrainian, claiming that ‘‘Comrade Skrypnyk could not have failed to know that he had entered upon the path of isolating the Ukrainian language from Russian and bringing it closer to Polish.’’52 Given what Poland still represented to Soviet authorities, such a move was the height of treason. The party called upon Skrypnyk to admit his errors. He committed suicide on July 7, rather than recant. It seems probable that Moscow viewed Skrypnyk and his supporters as a possible ‘‘fifth column’’ in the event of war with Poland or Germany. Whether Moscow actually believed that war might occur is a subject for further discussion. Regardless, the party had found a scapegoat for its campaign against what it viewed as a separatist Ukrainian national culture. It played upon fears of foreign intervention as expressed by the popular press and in this way justified its suppression of ukrainizatsiia.

The Road to the November Plenum Moscow’s suspicions of foreign designs on Soviet Ukraine persisted during the course of these proceedings against Skrypnyk. In late July, the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw questioned his German counterpart regarding press reports of a ‘‘secret Polish-German agreement on joint conquest of the Soviet Ukraine.’’53 According to the German ambassador in Poland, the Soviet Union ‘‘was convinced that leading German personalities were preparing a ‘crusade’ against the Soviet Union.’’ He blamed the Poles for exploiting the Soviet ‘‘pathological fear of intervention’’ to turn the Soviet Union against Germany. A new complication in Soviet-Polish relations arose when, on October 21, a Ukrainian student, Mykola Lemyk, attempted to assassinate the Soviet viceconsul in Lwów. He failed in his task, killing one consulate secretary and injuring another. However, Antonov-Ovseenko’s note to the Polish government alleged that ‘‘this attempt could have only arisen in the atmosphere created by the mentioned [anti-Soviet] campaign which is tolerated, in spite of its illegality, by some Polish authorities.’’54 Although Beck and AntonovOvseenko agreed to close the matter after Polish authorities made numerous arrests of Ukrainians allegedly connected to the plot, tensions remained beneath the surface. In early November, Antonov-Ovseenko again raised the issue of anti-Soviet activity in the Malopolsha territory.55 He charged that this campaign was being led from above and had the active support of local Polish authorities. In mid-November, the German and Polish governments issued a communiqué announcing that they had entered into negotiations regarding the settlement of issues long disputed between them. Moscow believed that this information confirmed its fear regarding German-Polish cooperation against the Soviet Union. In Warsaw Antonov-Ovseenko objected to Beck about the secret nature of these talks and accused Pi™sudski of playing a ‘‘chess game’’ with Moscow.56 His report to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs on November 27 182

Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR cited Polish rumors that Hitler might have sounded the Polish negotiators out on the ‘‘possibility of an anti-Soviet agreement.’’57 Talk of a secret anti-Soviet war clause included in a possible Polish-German agreement eventually became so widespread that the German Foreign Ministry had to deny the existence of any such agreement to its own legation in Poland.58 In spite of the German ambassador’s assurance that ‘‘there were no anti-Russian intentions of any kind’’ in the talks with Poland, Litvinov insisted that he ‘‘had enough material that proved that Germany had by no means given up Ukraine and plans for a crusade.’’59 Such talk helped bolster the campaign against ukrainizatsiia. In November 1933, a plenum of the KP(b)U’s Central Committee met to consider, among other items, the future direction of the nationalities policy. The plenum now condemned Skrypnyk as the head of a large network of ‘‘nationalist agents’’ in the service of foreign interventionist powers. Speakers made repeated reference to the danger represented by foreign countries, particularly Germany and Poland. Postyshev noted that Ukraine was ‘‘first in the appetite of the Polish pany, German imperialists, and English diehards.’’ A ‘‘block of imperialist interventionists, Ukrainian White émigrés, and domestic Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolutionaries’’ had coalesced to oppose collectivization and to separate Ukraine from the Soviet Union.60 Similarly Stanislav Kosior, First Secretary of the KP(b)U, reminded those gathered that, given its strategic location, ‘‘Ukraine occupies a forward position in relation to capitalist encirclement.’’ He accused Ukrainian nationalists abroad of utilizing ukrainizatsiia to prepare ‘‘for an uprising, under the direction of known Polish and German elements, in order to conceal a foreign military campaign against the Soviet Union.’’ Polish and German money, he argued, was funding nationalist organizations in Soviet Ukraine.61 Kosior claimed that prominent Ukrainian Communists were, in fact, heading a branch of the nationalist Ukrainian Military Organization in Soviet Ukraine. He then read the testimony of a number of prominent Soviet Ukrainians charged with ‘‘bourgeois nationalist’’ crimes. Nearly all confessed to agreements they had reached with foreign powers, particularly Poland, for help in their struggle. One such testimony read as follows: Germany together with France, Poland, and other capitalist states is taking part in an attack on the Soviet Union. Poland is ceding its German territory and the Danzig corridor to Germany. As compensation, after conquering Ukraine, Poland will receive part of Lithuania’s territory and a sphere of influence over the Right Bank to the Black Sea. The Left Bank of Ukraine will come under the influence of Germany which could exploit the coal and iron wealth of the Donbas in order to create a strong industrial center.62

This statement reproduces almost exactly some of the fears of Soviet diplomats regarding the intentions of Poland and Germany toward the Soviet Union. The charge of Ukrainian complicity in a Polish attack further motivated the 183

Matthew D. Pauly party’s course. Those charged with shifting the course of nationalities policy in Ukraine capably used these concerns to legitimize their task. The party directly expunged the notion of a singular Ukrainian national identity from its formula of Soviet patriotism and claimed Ukrainian territory for the proletarian ‘‘homeland.’’ The end result of this purge was the party’s identification of ‘‘local nationalism’’ as the chief danger to Soviet power in Ukraine. The party rated this danger greater than Great Russian chauvinism because of the alleged connection between Ukrainian nationalism and foreign powers. If Soviet patriotism was not yet strongly identified with Russian patriotism, the party decisively rejected the inclusion of a political Ukrainian identity. Two months later, the Twelfth Congress of the KP(b)U met and confirmed this formulation.

Further Questions This essay has identified a number of high points of Soviet concern for the security of Ukraine. During 1933 that concern became acute owing to rumors of a more defined plan of conquest formulated by leaders in Germany and supported by the Polish government and Ukrainian nationalist organizations abroad. The party transposed fear of a possible foreign threat to Ukraine into a script for a campaign against Ukrainian national culture and for the consolidation of a supranational Soviet identity. It explicitly connected the actions of those charged with ‘‘national deviation’’ to plans for foreign intervention and the reestablishment of a bourgeois national state, cut out of the proletarian ‘‘homeland.’’ Did the Soviet government really believe in the possibility of an attack on the Soviet Union? Even before the final signing of the German-Polish nonaggression pact in January 1934 the Soviet government attempted to provide for its increased security against a German-Polish threat. In December 1933 negotiations began between Poland and the Soviet Union on a joint declaration guaranteeing the sovereignty of the Baltic states. Soviet diplomats repeatedly expressed concern that Germany might conquer these states in order to establish outposts for a future invasion of the Soviet Union. When Poland withdrew from these talks because of German and Finnish objections, the Soviet Union then extended the same offer to Germany. When Germany declined, the Soviet Union had to content itself with a series of bilateral agreements with the Baltic states and a renewal of its nonaggression pact with Poland. The threat of foreign intervention, then, was genuine enough for the Soviet government to labor for measures to counter it. The war scare of 1933, if one may call it that, was much more grounded in reality than the scare of 1926–27. The alleged danger from Poland itself originated from two sources: the OUN and Poles who supported Pi™sudski’s policy of federation with Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania. For propaganda reasons, the Soviet press and the 184

Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR party tended to conflate the two, although they were in fact hostile to each other. Soviet officials regularly monitored the anti-Soviet statements of the Polish government or press. However, in many ways, the threat embodied by the OUN to Soviet Ukraine was more real. Notwithstanding its own sense of military might, Poland’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1920 had nearly ended in failure, and Poland was not likely to try again without a major provocation. The OUN, on the other hand, was a product of a Ukrainian cultural and political movement. It is possible that Ukrainians would in time come to identify with the nationalist organization, in spite of its rightist political orientation. The KP(b)U made a great effort to show that the OUN was not in fact striving for Ukrainian independence but rather for the restoration of a foreign-controlled vassal state. Lastly, it is not clear how the KP(b)U understood and discussed threats of war in closed party sessions. I have had access to published collections of documents related to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, but these represent only a tiny fraction of those written. Given the selective nature of these documents, it is difficult to appreciate how exactly Soviet diplomats viewed the Polish, German, and Ukrainian nationalist threats, to say nothing of the perspective of Ukrainian party officials. While the Soviet press frequently publicized these concerns, the details of talks with foreign governments remain unknown. What can be said more or less conclusively is that Soviet diplomats and the Soviet press repeatedly warned of threats to Ukraine. Furthermore, Communist Party leaders in Ukraine utilized the fear of a Polish-led attack to shape their struggle against an emergent Ukrainian national culture that early Soviet nationalities policy had in part stimulated but that now threatened the party’s conception of a supranational patriotism. By the mid-1930s, the party would co-opt Russian national imagery even more in its consolidation of a Soviet identity. Although a Ukrainian national awareness was not expunged entirely, it was rendered politically impotent and tied to very un-Polish Russia. NOTES 1. Pravda, November 27, 1933. 2. For an account of Pi™sudski’s ideas on federalism and his preference for accommodation with the borderland populations, see M. K. Dziewanowski, Joseph Pi™sudski: A European Federalist, 1918–1922 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), 26–42, 244–61; Andrzej Garlicki, Józef Pi™sudski, 1867–1935, trans. John Coutouvidis (Hants, U.K.: Scolar, 1995), 91–105. Historians of Ukraine have tended to emphasize the opportunistic nature of Pi™sudski’s plans for the East. See Michael Palij, The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1995), 59–79; John Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), 263–316. 3. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20 (London: Macdonald, 1972), 65.

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Matthew D. Pauly 4. Comintern secretary Karl Radek acted as the chief Soviet propagandist for peace, warning, however, that continued aggression against Soviet Russia would lead to revolution in Poland. See Thomas C. Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat from Poland, 1920: From Permanent Revolution to Peaceful Coexistence (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 53–69; Josef Korbel, Poland between East and West: Soviet and German Diplomacy toward Poland, 1919–1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 26–33, 36. 5. Davies argues that Pi™sudski, in fact, acted contrary to the wishes of the Entente, whose leaders sought to provide for Poland’s defense but discouraged a Polish attack on the Soviet Union. See Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 92–95. 6. The Ukrainian Galicians had fought a losing battle with Polish forces for control of the province, where Ukrainians made up an overwhelming majority of the rural population although the bulk of the urban population was Polish. For many Ukrainian Galicians, Poland remained the principal enemy. 7. Davies maintains that the Ukrainian force was insignificant and that the alliance was an afterthought for Pi™sudski (White Eagle, Red Star, 102). Palij disagrees, arguing that the Poles had considerable Ukrainian troops under their command but armed them poorly, blocked further recruitment, and disarmed Galician divisions that offered their services (The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 105–13). 8. Citied in Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, 115. 9. Ibid. 10. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 17. 11. See, for example, Alfred G. Meyer, ‘‘The War Scare of 1927,’’ Soviet Union/ Union Sovietique 5, no. 1 (1978): 1–25; Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘‘The Foreign Threat during the First Five-Year Plan,’’ Soviet Union/Union Sovietique 5, no. 1 (1978): 26–38; and Raymond Sontag, ‘‘The War Scare of 1926–27,’’ Russian Review 34, no. 1 (1975): 66–77. 12. Meyer, ‘‘The War Scare of 1927,’’ 15. 13. Great Britain Foreign Office, Documents on British Foreign Policy, ser. 1A, 62 vols. (London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1946–1985), 3:45. 14. Ibid., 359. 15. Jane Degras, ed., Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 2:229. 16. Meyer, ‘‘The War Scare of 1927,’’ 2. 17. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 21. 18. James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 113. 19. Quoted in Basil Dmytryshyn, Moscow and Ukraine, 1918–1953: A Study of Russian Bolshevik Nationality Policy (New York: Bookman, 1956), 111. 20. Roman Solchanyk, ‘‘The Communist Party of Western Ukraine, 1919–1938’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1973), 252. 21. Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 2:316. 22. Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-polskikh otnoshenii, 12 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963–1986), 5:390–92. 23. Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Robert M. Slusser, eds., Soviet Foreign Policy, 1928– 1934 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), 220.

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Soviet Polonophobia and in the Ukrainian SSR 24. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 21 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1957–77), 13:117. 25. Ibid., 13:149. 26. Nevertheless, anti-Soviet attitudes cited from Iefremov’s diary were accurate. See Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘‘Stalinskii ‘velikii perelom’ i protses nad ‘Soiuzom Osvobozhdeniia Ukrainy,’ ’’ Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 1 (1994): 195. 27. George O. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162. 28. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 276. 29. Kuromiya, ‘‘Stalinskii ‘velikii perelom,’ ’’ 194. 30. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 13:156. 31. Izvestiia, March 18, 1930. 32. Jonathan Haslam, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930–33: The Impact of the Depression (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 31. 33. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 13:241–42, 244–45, 247, 302–303, 345– 51. 34. Eudin and Slusser, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1:264. 35. Ibid., 1:347. 36. Great Britain Foreign Office, Documents on British Foreign Policy, ser. 2, vol. 7, 154. 37. Alexander Motyl, ‘‘Ukrainian Nationalist Political Violence in Inter-War Poland, 1921–1939,’’ East European Quarterly 19 (1985): 48. 38. Solchanyk, ‘‘The Communist Party of Western Ukraine,’’ 300. 39. Stephen Horak, Poland and Her National Minorities (New York: Indiana University Libraries, 1961), 162. 40. Izvestiia, 18 March 1930. 41. Solchanyk, ‘‘The Communist Party of Western Ukraine,’’ 308. 42. Bohdan Burudowycz, Polish-Soviet Relations, 1932–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 9. 43. Great Britain Foreign Office, Documents on British Foreign Policy, ser. 2, vol. 7, 284. 44. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 15:645. 45. Germany, Auswartiges Amt., Documents on German Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1949–1983), ser. C, 1:143. 46. Pravda, 13 March 1933. 47. Ibid., 17 March 1933. 48. Eudin and Slusser, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1:97. 49. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 16:355. 50. Pravda, 22 June 1933. 51. Ibid., 3 July 1933. 52. Cited in Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, 279. 53. Germany, Auswartiges Amt., Documents on German Foreign Policy, ser. C, 1:695. 54. Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-polskikh otnoshenii, 6:97. 55. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 16:661. 56. Ibid., 16:672. 57. Ibid., 16:691.

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Matthew D. Pauly 58. Germany, Auswartiges Amt., Documents on German Foreign Policy, ser. C, 2:148. 59. Ibid., 2:303. 60. Pravda, December 6, 1933. 61. Ibid., December 2, 1933. 62. Ibid.

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twelve

Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´

The description of the relationship between a poet and a country—Joseph Brodsky and Poland—is a risky undertaking. Brodsky is not a typical poet, nor is he a typical representative of Russian culture: in fact, there was nothing typical about him at all, as he himself somewhat ironically wrote: My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked, But at least no chorus can ever sing it back.1

Yet he lived in a specific historical moment, and his relationship to Poland was part of a longer political and cultural history of Polono-Russian influences. So it is legitimate to ask if the ‘‘Polish connection’’ was important for Brodsky. Perhaps it was only an effort to find a way to the outside from under the totalitarian pressure, or perhaps only part of his personal history of Polish friendships. His readings and translations, should they be the object of literary studies of influences and indebtedness? Is there a detectable influence of Polish literature in the work of Brodsky? And, if not, should his Polish interests be dismissed?

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ Brodsky’s unique (and uniquely successful) effort to master English and become an English-language writer and poet makes a study of his relationship to Polish very relevant. I see in it the first step in the reaching out to another culture that was characteristic of his work. Other great Russian poets also had a need to stretch into a different culture: Boris Pasternak was fascinated by Georgia, and Osip Mandelshtam by Armenia. Brodsky’s curiosity about and absorption and playful adaptation of Polish was perhaps a tryout for his later entrance into the sphere of the English language. This would be reason enough to give it attention.

The Generation Born in 1940, Brodsky belonged to a generation that came of age in the period of the invisible, slow bleeding away of communist ideology. He was thirteen when Stalin died, sixteen when the ‘‘Thaw,’’ ‘‘Polish October,’’ and the Hungarian revolt shook the ‘‘socialist bloc.’’ Poland was then located firmly within the Soviet Empire; there was even a rhymed saying: ‘‘the chicken is not a bird, and Poland is not abroad’’ (‘‘Kuritsa ne ptitsa, Pol’sha ne zagranitsa’’). But culturally, artistically, and intellectually, Poland was (relatively) open to the West. And the Russian intelligentsia and their Polish friends used that opening as much as they were able. This situation was captured, as everything else that is important, in a contemporary Russian anecdote. It starts with a question: What is different in the ways a Swede, a Pole, and a Russian engage in group sex? In Sweden, group sex is when a Swede has sex simultaneously with several people. In Poland, group sex is when a Pole tells a group of his friends how he witnessed group sex in Sweden. And in Russia, group sex is when a Russian tells how he was in a group of people in Poland listening to that Pole describing to a group of his friends his group sex experience in Sweden. The anecdote, of course, speaks about the indirect route Russians had to take to what Osip Mandelshtam (and Brodsky after him) called ‘‘world culture.’’ And not only Russians: I am speaking here about a generation of intelligentsia from many of the then Soviet republics, born around the time of World War II. Tomas Venclova, the Lithuanian poet, and later Brodsky’s friend, read, as did many of his friends, almost all of Western literature in Polish: Proust, Kafka, Musil, and even Thomas Mann because these books were not accessible in Lithuania in any other language. We bought them sometimes on the black market, sometimes in stores; on the black market we were able to get even Gombrowicz or Mi™osz. . . . These friends of mine, some of them beginning writers, some simply intelligent people, learned Polish very early on to know what is happening in the world. I know that it sounds strange, but even Trybuna Ludu [the organ of the Polish Communist Party] was useful—one could

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Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland learn more about the world by reading it than from Pravda or Lithuanian ˙ Tiesa which also means ‘‘truth’’ [like Pravda]. Not to mention Zycie Warszawy, Przekrój and especially Twórczo´sc´ . . . that one could even subscribe to then. Likewise Dialog, Polityka, and other [Polish] publications. For me and my friends it all started in October, after 1956.2

Although Venclova and Brodsky lived in different parts of the Soviet Union and did not know each other till the late 1960s, their search for ‘‘world culture’’ led, by geopolitical necessity, along the same path—through Poland. ‘‘In those days,’’ said Brodsky in an interview, ‘‘the bulk of Western literature, and of news about cultural events in the West, was not available in the Soviet Union, whereas Poland was even at that point the happiest and the most cheerful barrack in the entire camp. People there were much better informed and they were publishing all sorts of magazines and everything was translated into Polish; the publishing house Czytelnik was printing God knows what. I remember I was reading Malcolm Lowry, some of Proust, some of Faulkner, and also Joyce I first read in Polish. So that was the practical consideration: we needed a window into Europe, and the Polish language provided it.’’3 In another interview he said: ‘‘There was very little that was translated and we were learning about what was going on from Polish periodicals such as Polska, Przekrój, or Szpilki. We read them very attentively.’’4 In contrast to Soviet periodicals, which were heavy and circumspect, Polish periodicals, especially Przekrój, were light, satirical, witty, full of fashion photographs, articles about Western art, literature, and philosophy. Przekrój was known for translations of Western short stories, Twórczo´sc´ presented Western literature, and Dialog printed exciting new plays. In an atmosphere of an ‘‘emphatic and self-asserting diet of Russian verse,’’5 young members of the Soviet intelligentsia found these periodicals both attractive in their lightness and intellectually and artistically inspiring. The detachment and ‘‘absurdist’’ gaiety of, for example, Konstanty Ildefons Ga™czynski’s ´ poetry and short theater pieces was profoundly liberating. Poland then became for the Russian intelligentsia an object of ‘‘cultural snobbism’’6 or even ‘‘Polonomania.’’7 Venclova and his group of friends, to quote one example, loved things Polish and played at speaking a bit in Polish among themselves; whenever Brodsky came to Vilnius, he would fall into that playful way of speaking and enjoy it very much. That generation grew up admiring Polish anti-Nazi resistance, and Romantic insurrections, Venclova told me, and some early Brodsky poems definitely attest to that. In the 1960 poem ‘‘Song,’’ he mentions two Polish musical motifs: the anthem and the song about the battle of Monte Cassino. The Nazi invasion of Poland is also the background of the poem ‘‘September the First’’ (1967). These poems contain images of World War II from the Polish perspective. Perhaps Brodsky was looking for his own, non-cliché way of commemorating the ravages of war, which were incessantly celebrated in the official literature. Poland offered him a manner to do that in his own way.

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´

The Language Was the interest of this generation in Poland itself or rather in its location? Brodsky liked to say that Lithuania was a step in the right direction, that is, toward the West. And Poland was a step farther in the same direction. The easiest access to Western culture was through Poland, and the Polish language was the key to reading Western literature. The degree to which the language was mastered and demanding authors such as Joyce and Proust read must have varied. Venclova was probably among the most accomplished readers of Polish translations of Western literature, but it was in Polish nevertheless that the Russian intelligentsia, among them young Leningrad friends of Brodsky, glimpsed Western novels and short stories, and learned about existentialism and other Western ‘‘isms.’’ With the language came its culture. It was also then that some of them read the Polish poets such as Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Konstanty Ildefons Ga™czynski, ´ Stanis™aw Grochowiak, and Jerzy Harasymowicz, developed interest in Polish prose writers, Polish film—especially Andrzej Wajda’s movies—and Polish actresses. They also listened to Polish jazz. Poland, as Brodsky said, was ‘‘a source of culture.’’ It would be very difficult to say at this moment how much of Polish culture got absorbed in this process, how much of the medium remained behind with the message. Poland’s role was to transmit culture from the West. In PolishRussian relations this was not unusual. Poland was always, so to speak, Russia’s Western border. Through that ‘‘border’’ came ideas and words. ‘‘Polish (both spoken and written) became [in the seventeenth century] the natural linguistic mediator between West European languages (including Latin) and Russian,’’ writes A. V. Issatschenko in his chapter of the history of Slavic literary languages. ‘‘The majority of early Russian borrowings from German and the Romance languages bear distinct marks of the Polish pronunciation. . . . Polish remained the mediating language between Russia and the West until the nineteenth century. . . . For a long time, Poland was also a prestigious model in literary matters. Polish metrics was mechanically imitated in Muscovy where a few poetae docti (most of them born in Poland) used Polish versification rules in Church Slavonic composition.’’8 This imitation was soon abandoned, as the metrical principles of Polish and Russian are very different.9 In the 1950s and 1960s, Poland’s role as a mediator of Western culture to Russia again became vital. The isolation of the USSR magnified Poland’s ‘‘Western’’ appeal. Travel to and from Poland was very difficult at that time, and yet some direct human contacts did occur. There were, for example, Poles who studied in the Soviet Union, and the road to ‘‘world culture’’ was for some, including Brodsky, facilitated by friendship with them. A very important person in Brodsky’s early connection to Poland was a young Polish woman, Zofia Kapu´scinska. ´ Several of his early poems written in the years 1960–65 are dedicated to her and contain Polish motifs. Now a professor at Katowice University 192

Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland under her married name, Ratajczakowa, she thinks she first met Brodsky in 1960.10 Brodsky said of her: ‘‘I knew a girl who was from Poland, Zo´ska was her name; she was studying in Leningrad then. She was married to a physicist, an athletic fellow, so it was a dangerous acquaintance. She knew I was writing poetry, so she gave me, or rather I heard in her apartment a record with [Konstanty I.] Ga™czynski ´ reading some of his poems and I liked them very much. . . . Since I was interested in poetry, I started translating it. I began with Ga™czynski ´ and went on to do translations of [Julian] Tuwim, Harasymowicz, Grochowiak, [Zbigniew] Herbert, and Norwid. I even wanted to translate Miko™aj Rej [a Renaissance poet]. I was a great admirer of Polish poetry.’’11 Brodsky’s translating work was quite extensive. Many Russian poets in that period earned their living by translations, and he was one of them. He translated from Greek, Spanish, Czech, and Italian, whatever poems there were to work on, proposed by editors and journals. But his Polish translations seemed to be of better quality than the others (according to V. Kulle), and he continued these translations after he left Russia. In his last years in New York, he translated Herbert and Szymborska, this time into English. It is certainly noteworthy that, in his self-presentation during his 1964 trial, he described himself not only as a poet but also as a translator of Polish poetry. It was while translating that he mastered the language, and, as if anticipating what would come later in his relationship with English, he wrote some funny verses in Polish, mostly as dedications or jokes. For example, he wrote a charming dedication in Polish to ‘‘Zo´ska’’ on her personal copy of the poem ‘‘Prorochestvo’’ (‘‘Prophecy’’) (1965): Pani o wielkiej urodzie/mieszkaj˛acej w pagodzie/ chinskiej— ´ / mlle Kapu´scinskiej.’’ ´ Stanis™aw Baranczak ´ has translated this funny little joke, which means, in literal translation, ‘‘To a lady/of great beauty/who lives in a Chinese pagoda— / Mlle Kapu´scinska’’ ´ as follows: To the great beauty, Who is so snooty, She lives in a pagoda, Strictly on Scotch and Soda (Both Chinese — Jeez! . . . ), Is cuter than most Sophies, And I’m one of her trophies.12

Another amusing Polish poem written by Brodsky consists of Christmas greetings, accompanied by a drawing of an archangel, sent to Andrzej Drawicz and his wife, with the following text: ‘‘Patrz˛ac bardzo smutnym wzrokiem / w strony s´wiata te i owe / Joseph Brodsky z NOWYM ROKIEM / Was pozdrawia/DRAWICOWE.’’13

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ These brief poems and his memory for Polish, which he still retained when he received an honorary degree in Poland in 1993, are not only additional proofs of his exceptional talent for languages but also of his extraordinary capacity to absorb cultures. ‘‘I am a sponge,’’ he said about it.14 And, as with everything else, he did it in his own way. His study of Polish does not typify the usual language lessons: it was all-encompassing. In the years 1964–65, while in exile in the Archangelsk region, he read the Polish weekly Przekrój— Natalia Gorbanevskaia was sending him her subscription issues.15 More than twenty years later, in 1988, in a letter to Andrzej Drawicz, Brodsky remembered that ‘‘sometime in 64–65 Gorbaniewska mailed to me to the country [he means here exile] an issue of Przekrój with, on its cover, a face as beautiful as any I have seen since: it was a woman-designer it seems from Kraków or perhaps from Gdynia, Teresa Wierzbianska. ´ I hope’’—he continued—‘‘that in the matter of looks the country did not change that much.’’16 It is as if Poland, like France with her Marianne, had for him the face of a woman. As evident from the above quotation, Poland was a source of many kinds of cultural goods and standards: to immerse themselves in Western culture, members of the Soviet intelligentsia needed more than words. That culture, after all, consisted of objects, music, smells, and images, and many of these arrived via Poland and the Polish language. Looking back over the letters from Brodsky, ‘‘Zo´ska’’ saw that in almost every one of them he asked her to send him candles, and to ask for candles from his other friends, including Andrzej Drawicz. At the time she was puzzled about why he needed so many candles. In my view, it indicates the need Brodsky had to make his life aesthetically complete with words, sounds, images, and light. And it was not only Poles who supplied him with candles. Anna Akhmatova brought back two beautiful candles from her stay in Syracuse and asked Anatoly Nayman to bring the candles to Brodsky in Norinskaya where he was in exile.17 Brodsky kept in touch with ‘‘Zo´ska’’ for years afterward, and, at his request, she sent him records of classical music and books—Polish and foreign—which were then easily accessible in Poland and also rather cheap. According to ‘‘Zo´ska,’’ it was she who mailed to Brodsky, while he was in exile, the volume of English-language poetry with photographs of the poets, which he mentions in his essay about W. H. Auden.18 That book marked a turning point: upon receiving it, Brodsky abandoned Polish and started to concentrate on English.19 Ironically, this is another significant indication of Poland’s mediating role between Russia and the West.

The Poems While candles and books were sent to Russia, Brodsky’s poems traveled to Poland. The already mentioned Andrzej Drawicz was the first translator of Brodsky into Polish. In fact, Brodsky was published in Poland before seeing his

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Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland name in print in any other country but Russia. There he appeared in 1960 in the samizdat publication Syntaksis (no. 3 [1960]). His poem for children, ‘‘The Ballad of a Little Tugboat,’’ was published in Kostior, no. 11 (1962), and it was his first official publication in Russia. He was then twenty-two years old. Two years later, his poems started to appear in the Russian émigré press: his trial made it impossible to print his poems in his own country.20 In the United States his poems first appeared in the New Leader in 1964, after he was sentenced to exile.21 Of course, he was well known even before having been published, mostly because of samizdat, whose reach was very wide and included Poland. Stanis™aw Baranczak ´ first read his poems in 1963 in Poznan; ´ I saw a samizdat notebook with three handwritten poems of his also around that time in Warsaw. In Russia his poems were recited by memory by many of his contemporaries and, to his irritation, were even set to music and sung in private apartments. In this ‘‘pre-Gutenberg’’ era (a phrase attributed to A. Akhmatova) people learned his work by heart, and, far from being an ‘‘unpublished’’ poet, he was better known than many of his voluminously printed contemporaries. His poems in Drawicz’s translation appeared in 1963 in the weekly Wspó™czesno´sc´ .22 ‘‘Drawicz was the first person who translated my poems into a foreign, that is your, Polish language,’’ said Brodsky in Katowice. ‘‘It was the first open window on world culture for which I was thirsting.’’23 And his early friendships with Poles, especially Andrzej Drawicz, Wiktor Woroszylski, and Witold D˛abrowski, lasted all their lives. The 1993 ceremony at Katowice University was an occasion marked by very warm conversations between Drawicz and Brodsky, with Brodsky literally moved to tears several times.24 In Brodsky’s words: This [what happened in Katowice] is one of the strongest feelings in my life. And I had similarly strong experiences twice in my life. Once, it was probably in 1970 or 1971, when I learned that a poet, whom I respect very much, the English poet W. H. Auden, is writing an introduction to the volume of my poems, and a second time when I received the Nobel Prize in 1987. It was in London. I went to the BBC radio station, to say a few words to my readers in Russia. And it was to that station that somebody called, speaking Polish. I was called to the phone. The call was from Witek Woroszylski, who was then staying with Leszek Ko™akowski [in Oxford]. Witek says: ‘‘I congratulate you. I would also like to thank you for the poem you wrote for me and Drawicz.’’ ‘‘What poem?’’ I ask. And he [answers]: ‘‘A Martial Law Carol.’’ ‘‘Aha,’’ I say, ‘‘this one. Not at all.’’ And then he says: ‘‘You simply don’t know, don’t understand how it was.’’ It turns out that somebody cut this poem written in English out of a newspaper and slipped it for them under the door of the cell while they were interned. Without exaggeration I can say that this made a bigger impression on me than the Nobel Prize and all that was linked to it. And since I am reminiscing, the third event that shook me so was indeed yesterday’s experience [here in Katowice] in the Wyspianski ´ Theater.25

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ Never before, it seems, had Brodsky been exposed to so much genuine admiration, and he lost his usual composure. As he explained afterward, he knew how to react to hostility but was totally disarmed by affection.

Independence Brodsky always abhorred monoculture and ‘‘monolingualism.’’ ‘‘The idea that a writer must be monolingual is something of an insult to both the individual writer and, I would say, to the human mind,’’ he maintained.26 For him, Polish, as we have seen, played the role of an opening onto the world, later substantially enlarged by English. Andrzej Drawicz said that when he first met him in Leningrad—at the beginning of the 1960s—Brodsky was ‘‘ecstatic about Poland’’ and ‘‘maintained that Poland was the poetics of his generation.’’27 Polish culture was perhaps the first one to fascinate him. His attachment to Russia and to the United States was filled with ambivalence, and Tomas Venclova maintains that he genuinely loved only three countries: Italy, Poland, and Lithuania.28 Whatever the case, let us return to the initial question: Did Brodsky’s fifteen-year relationship with Poland have any lasting consequences for him? Or for Russia? Or Poland? When, in 1993, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Katowice University, Brodsky said, ‘‘Poland is dear to me.’’ In many of his speeches and interviews he repeated that he had learned a feeling of independence from Poles. It would be very flattering to Polish culture that Brodsky, one of the most independent minds of the second half of the twentieth century, would learn that particular characteristic from Poles. I doubt, however, that Poles can take the credit. His early biography and his behavior during his 1964 trial clearly show him as an indomitable spirit. A learner looks for affinities in the culture from which he learns. From the start Brodsky was fiercely independent, but Poland may have shown him how that independence could be shaped. Perhaps Brodsky was referring to political rather than individual independence, a group phenomenon. After all, he was part of a generation that, as mentioned above, learned its way of ‘‘being in the world’’ in the second half of the 1950s and the 1960s, possibly the recipient of some of Poland’s ideological detachment. Besides, the image of an independent, rebellious Poland is part of the Russian cultural baggage. Brodsky liked to repeat approvingly what, to this author, is a rather derogatory statement by Akhmatova, who, quoting Osip Mandelshtam, often said that Poles do not know how to fight but know how to rebel. I believe that this characterization has a long and unpleasant history, having been used by Catherine the Great, as well as other occupiers of Poland, to ridicule Polish efforts at resistance (Bismarck is believed to have said that Poles are poets in politics and politicians in poetry). But for Brodsky, and perhaps for Akhmatova, it meant that, unlike Russians, Poles could never be broken, whatever the circumstances. Brodsky found proof of this even in the Polish vocabulary: the word niepodleg™o´sc´ —meaning political and social inde196

Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland pendence—represented for him a very special concept, translatable into its etymological meaning (as he believed) of ‘‘never lying down under something.’’ He rendered it in English as ‘‘un-prone-ness,’’ ‘‘un-submissive-ness.’’ For him, Polish rebelliousness was determined by linguistic inevitability. In expressing his gratitude to Poles for that rebelliousness, Brodsky emphasized many times that it was innate, involuntary, predetermined. In his view Poles could not help but to rebel, even if it was unreasonable. In his Katowice speech he mentions this rebelliousness approvingly. ‘‘It was neither the force of your arms nor a conscious choice to resist that brought that political system down, but one word [niepodleg™o´sc´ ], or just its prefix [nie-] euphorically triggering your instinctive response to it.’’29 If this author feels somewhat uneasy about these words, it is because we all come from cultures that value Aristotle’s ‘‘autonomy of will’’ and conscious choice more than instinctive responses, however noble. Also, it reminds me of Brodsky’s negative attitude toward the Decembrist insurrection, especially to the fact that it had failed (he blamed it on the Decembrists’ character). Paraphrasing Pushkin’s disdain of the Pugachev rebellion, he ridiculed the effort for its mindlessness.30 Is stubborn instinct superior to free will? Would the deliberate resistance of Poles be considered less valuable? Was that resistance truly instinctual? Most interesting in this regard is a certain ambivalence, one, I imagine, that those who grew up in an imperial culture feel toward those brave people on the margins of the empire, especially if these same people have a history of having engaged in a number of unsuccessful rebellions against that empire. Brodsky himself was always acutely aware of the imperial character of Russia and its culture. He radically subverted the pull the empire had on him by feeling (and being) an outsider. But the observation that Poles are a ‘‘small nation’’ and Poland is ‘‘a small country’’—as he wrote in the introduction to the Italian edition of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry—can be made only by one who comes from Russia, the United States, or perhaps Brazil. Size is relative to one’s point of view. There was a tradition in Russia that—if Western standards were applied— recognized Polish cultural superiority while claiming Russian priority in matters of morality and religion. It is sufficient here to mention Dostoyevsky, who rejected Poles as being devoid of true spirituality. That was definitely not Brodsky’s attitude. Further, that a solidly middle-sized country was perceived as small probably did not reflect a sense of superiority: Brodsky was truly interested in Lithuania, a tiny country by comparison. Yet these and other of Brodsky’s remarks (he liked to say ‘‘those Poles’’ with a smile and a little shrug) led me to ask Anatoly Nayman, Brodsky’s contemporary and a member of the same poetic group, about their ‘‘sizing’’ of Poland. ‘‘Don’t fool yourself,’’ he said, ‘‘Poland is not important to Russia.’’31 Indeed, in Nayman’s book Remembering Anna Akhmatova, which recounts readings, intellectual and artistic influences, and the literary culture of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s in Leningrad and Moscow, one can detect no indication of anything Polish, 197

Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ except for Akhmatova quoting Mandelshtam regarding the Poles only knowing how to rebel but not how to fight.32 Yet Nayman, too, learned Polish, read books in Polish, and translated Polish poetry into Russian, including poems by Szymborska.33 His book thoroughly describes the self-education of the literary circle of that time but with no mention of Poland.

Influence Let us return once again to the question of influence. All the quotations in which Brodsky speaks about Poland come from his speeches and interviews. Almost nothing about Poland or its culture appears in the two most important elements of his work, namely, his poetry and essays. As mentioned above, many of his early poems were dedicated to ‘‘Z.K.’’ (Zofia Kapu´scinska) ´ and contained Polish motifs. The poem ‘‘A Martial Law Carol,’’ also cited above, was a kind of letter to his friends. Another later poem, ‘‘Polonaise: Variation,’’ also contains Polish motifs, but the polonaise itself was a very common form in Russian music, even serving as Russia’s first anthem. These thematic appearances in Brodsky’s work should not be the only basis, perhaps, for measuring the impact of a culture. Ann Kjellberg, for example, considers Brodsky’s poems about Lithuania to be similar to ‘‘Polonaise’’ and related ‘‘in spirit’’ to Mi™osz’s ‘‘Elegy for N.N.,’’ a poem Brodsky admired, translated into Russian, and taught in his college poetry classes every year.34 Although his translations were certainly an especially attentive way to read poetry, it would be difficult to detect their influence. About his extraordinary friendship with Czes™aw Mi™osz Brodsky stated: ‘‘Mi™osz is my electromagnetic field. Where he is, this is where I am as well.’’35 But how does one trace such an influence? To answer that question, one must first define the specificity, the uniqueness, of Polish culture. Although I have cited Poland’s thematic influence on Brodsky, I still am unable to point to other ways in which Polish culture differs from other European traditions. Like Brodsky’s relationship with Poland, the influence of other cultures is not clearly visible in his work. Literary critics marveled at Akhmatova’s clear lack of influence on Brodsky’s poetry. Yet she was a formidable presence in his life and in the life of his literary friends. Brodsky himself wrote about the issue of influence. ‘‘Man is what he reads,’’ he wrote in his essay about W. H. Auden.36 Similarly, in a 1989 unpublished conversation with Mi™osz, he stated: ‘‘Everything that you read influences you one way or another, imperceptibly or directly or whatever it is, most likely imperceptibly.’’ And in another conversation he replied irritably to a question regarding John Donne’s influence on him: ‘‘He did influence me. Naturally he influenced me, but then who am I that John Donne should have influenced me? You can’t see it in my poems. At least I don’t think you can see it. . . . Almost anything you read has some influence.’’37 Brodsky’s impatience with such questions may have to do with the fact 198

Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland that there were certain individuals whose influence he wanted to acknowledge, for example, Latin poets, Tsvetaeva, and Auden. One can recognize in his work certain countries that captured his poetic imagination, especially Italy. Not unexpectedly, of course, he formulated the issue of influence differently. The beginning of his Nobel lecture is devoted to those whose influence he wishes to acknowledge: Mandelshtam, Tsvetaeva, Frost, Akhmatova, and ‘‘my beloved Auden.’’ ‘‘In my better moments,’’ he said, ‘‘I deem myself their sum total.’’ In this he speaks not only for himself but also as a representative of a generation that, ‘‘born precisely at the time the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his godlike, absolute power,’’ strove for and was able to re-create a cultural continuity, one that ‘‘was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin’s archipelago.’’38 To reconnect the culture, that generation had to reach back in time to the culture’s past, and also had to look to the outside, to Poland, for example, with its poetry and openness to the West. Thus I believe that Poland indeed had an impact on Brodsky’s life and work. Poland helped to reconnect him and his generation to the continuous flow of European culture; it brought in cultural models and languages, Polish and others, that enriched his idiom; it gave him respite from ‘‘the diet of selfassertive Russian verse’’; and it provided absurd humor, poetic ‘‘magic realism,’’ and colorful objects. In sum, Poland helped him ‘‘to enlarge his diction.’’39 Because influence, like a waterfall, assumes different levels and flows from a higher level to a lower one, perhaps, instead, it is preferable to speak of ‘‘sponge-like’’ absorption, appropriation, exchange, transformation, dialogue, and continuity. Brodsky loved Polish culture and made good use of it. And, in turn, Polish culture returned that love as well as gratitude for Brodsky’s own influence on the Polish culture.

Polish Friends This mutual relationship, this enduring friendship between the poet and the country of Poland, developed over a long period. Brodsky’s main attraction to Polish poetry was its excellence. ‘‘Poles are a happy nation,’’ he stated in 1993. ‘‘In half a century they have as many as three great poets: Mi™osz, Herbert and Szymborska.’’40 In fact, his relationship to Poland was tied directly to poetry. ‘‘My Poland comes from books,’’ he said in his Katowice speech. ‘‘Poland for me is a state of mind or a state of heart rather than a real—police or democratic—state.’’ In 1982, he became a member of the editorial board of the newly created literary quarterly Zeszyty literackie. And, further, his closest Polish friends were all poets and translators: Woroszylski, D˛abrowski, and Drawicz, and later Baranczak, ´ Zagajewski, and, of course, Mi™osz.41 But the later friendships with Baranczak, ´ Zagajewski, and Mi™osz form the second chapter of Brodsky’s relationship to Poland. He met with them, read their 199

Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ works—even Mi™osz42 —only when he was in the West. For then he no longer read Polish, as it was not necessary anymore. The three poets were exiles, representing an extraterritorial Poland—‘‘the Poland that comes from books,’’ a country comprised of poets. Brodsky, Baranczak, ´ Zagajewski, and Mi™osz belonged to what Mi™osz called ‘‘the confraternity of poets.’’ They collaborated with one another, helped one another, translated one another’s works. Here special mention is owed Stanis™aw Baranczak. ´ His translations of Brodsky’s poems and essays into Polish placed Brodsky firmly within the Polish canon. Another individual— Barbara Torunczyk, ´ the editor of Zeszyty literackie—ensured that Brodsky became known to every Pole who reads poetry and essays. And when Brodsky came to Poland in 1993 he met an admiring public fully aware of and conversant in his work. His influence on Poland at that time was clearly greater than Poland’s influence on him. It was then, as described above, that the unusual moment came when he could not contain his emotions. Perhaps it is true that he knew only how to deal with hostility and not how to deal with public admiration. Perhaps he was also moved by the unusual situation: Polish people expressing love for a Russian. After all, his decision to deliver his acceptance speech in English, and not in Russian, was made so as not to offend what he thought might be anti-Russian sensibility among the Poles. Or perhaps the admiration the Poles showed him caused him to imagine a possibly negative reaction among his Russian readers were he to return home one day. For Poland, of course, was not really ‘‘abroad.’’43 Perhaps his emotional reaction was not owing to space—the proximity of Russia—but rather to time, the indirect return to a situation of his youth. It was then that young people recited his poetry, just as they did in the Katowice theater, and it was then that Poland meant a promise, an opening, ‘‘a window on the world.’’ Poland kept that promise. Poland was good to Brodsky, and, through his emotional reaction, he showed his gratitude. Whatever he took from that country, if indeed he did, he returned with generous abundance.

Postscript In closing, I would like to return to the issue of Polish ‘‘independence.’’ For Brodsky, it was that independence—niepodleg™o´sc´ —though not ‘‘unsubmissiveness’’ alone, that undermined the Soviet Empire. ‘‘It wasn’t Solzhenitsyn who finished off Soviet power,’’ Brodsky said in his conversation with Adam Michnik, but events in Poland [during the era of Solidarity] when the Kremlin found itself in a highly unusual situation—in a state of ambivalence. The Kremlin realized that if it sent in the army, it would lose, and if it didn’t send in the army, it would also lose. Ambivalence is the greatest catastrophe for an ideologue. The moment it appears, it devours everything: it destroys the will to act. The moment that ‘‘and’’ appears, it’s the end, the end of the system.44

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Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland Brodsky was right: the undermining of the Soviet Empire came from its western territories. Other writers on the subject saw it as well. At the end of World War II, in May 1945, a young staff member of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, George F. Kennan, already predicted, in an internal memorandum, that the Soviet Union might prove unable to swallow the newly annexed western territories. ‘‘It should not be forgotten,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that the absorption of areas in the west beyond the Great Russian, White Russian, and Ukrainian ethnological boundaries is something at which Russia has already once tried and failed. . . . These western districts [were] a hotbed out of which there grew the greater part of the Russian Social Democratic Party which bore Lenin to power. . . . [They] proved indigestible to tsardom.’’ Kennan argued that absorption of western conquests undermined the Russian political tradition of ‘‘unlimited centralization of autocratic power, the Byzantine scholasticism of political thought, the exclusive self-segregation from the Western world, and even the mystic dreams of becoming the world’s ‘‘Third Rome.’’ He predicted that from these territories the ‘‘clouds of civil disintegration’’ would come.45 And they did. And this Brodsky foresaw as well and, as usual, in his own individual way. NOTES 1. Joseph Brodsky, ‘‘I Sit by the Window’’ (1971), trans. Howard Moss, in Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English, ed. Ann Kjellberg (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 46. I would like to thank Ann Kjellberg for her help with this essay. Quotations from the unpublished works of Joseph Brodsky are used by permission of the Estate of Joseph Brodsky. 2. Tomas Venclova in conversation with Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ and Jan T. Gross, ‘‘Rozmowa z Tomasem Venclov˛a’’ (Conversation with Tomas Venclova), Aneks 28 (1982): 123–53, quote at 124–25. I wish to thank Tomas Venclova for his conversations with me about the Polish-Lithuanian-Russian complexities. Research for this essay was, in large part, based on a series of written or verbal exchanges with people whose lives were marked by Brodsky. 3. Anna Husarska, ‘‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky,’’ New Leader, December 14, 1987. ˙ c w historii’’ (To live in history), interview with Jerzy Illg, in Reszty nie trzeba 4. ‘‘Zy´ (Conversations with Brodsky) (Katowice: Ksi˛az˙ nica, 1993), 113–27; quote at 122. 5. Joseph Brodsky, ‘‘To Please a Shadow,’’ in idem, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 357–83; quote at 360. 6. Piotr Fast, ‘‘Josif Brodski a Polska,’’ in Panorama Polska, no. 37 (Edmonton, Alberta, November 1996). 7. I. Adelgeim, ‘‘ ‘Rasshirenie rechii’ (Josif Brodskii i Pol’sha),’’ in Poliaki i Russkie v glazakh drug druga (Moscow: Indrik, 2000), 144–53; quote at 144. 8. A. V. Issatschenko, ‘‘Russian,’’ in The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development, ed. Alexander Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, Yale Russian and East European Publications (New Haven: Yale University Press 1980), 126–27. 9. It is interesting to note that there is a much greater metric similarity between

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ Russian, on the one hand, and German and English, on the other. This could explain to a certain degree the attraction that English-language poetry held for Brodsky, and also why he called Polish poetry ‘‘a French poetry with Slavic soul’’ (according to Nina Perlina, in a conversation, September 2000). 10. ‘‘To nie wzi˛e™o si˛e z powietrza. O Josifie Brodskim z Zofi˛a Ratajczakow˛a rozmawia Jerzy Illg’’ (It did not come from nowhere. Jerzy Illg speaks with Zofia Ratajczakowa about Joseph Brodsky), in Reszty nie trzeba (1963): 9–29; quote at 9. 11. Husarska, ‘‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky.’’ According to the writer and translator of Polish poetry into Russian Asar Eppel, the kind of poetry written by poets like Norwid, Ga™czynski, ´ or Szymborska does not exist in the Russian ‘‘treasury of poetry’’ (quoted in Joanna Szcz˛esna and Anna Bikont, Pamiatkowe ˛ rupiecie [Warsaw: Prószynski, ´ 1997], 216). Brodsky translated all three of these poets. 12. Translated for this essay, August 2000. 13. Quoted in El˙zbieta Tosza, Stan serca, Trzy dni z Josifem Brodskim (Katowice: ‘‘Ksi˛az˙ nica, 1993), 19, 14. The book is an interesting chronicle of the three days Brodsky spent in Katowice while receiving his honorary degree there. 14. Husarska, ‘‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky.’’ 15. As he mentioned in his 1993 interview with Ludmi™a Bo™otowa and Jadwiga Szymak-Reiferowa (Przekrój, July 4, 1993). 16. Tosza, Stan serca, 16. 17. Jerzy Illg speaks with Zofia Ratajczakowa about Joseph Brodsky, Reszty nie trzeba, 20. See also Anna Akhmatova’s letter to Brodsky, written from Komarovo on February 15, 1965, in Zeszyty literackie 57 (1997): 142. 18. Jerzy Illg speaks with Zofia Ratajczakowa about Joseph Brodsky, Reszty nie trzeba, 20. The essay is entitled ‘‘To Please a Shadow,’’ in Less Than One, 361. Brodsky mentions in the essay that the anthology was sent to him ‘‘by a friend from Moscow.’’ In a letter to this author, Zofia Ratajczakowa said that she mailed the anthology to friends in Leningrad requesting that they deliver it to Brodsky in Norinskaya. 19. In the interview with Husarska (‘‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky’’), Brodsky states: ‘‘I started to read English a long time ago. I was living up North, in my place of confinement or banishment, and somebody sent me an anthology of 20th-century English poetry as well as the collection of John Donne’s poems and sermons. I simply started to make those things out.’’ 20. Iosif Brodskii (St. Petersburg: Russian National Library, 1999). This work is an index of Brodsky’s Russian-language publications. 21. See Husarska, ‘‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky.’’ 22. ‘‘To nie wzi˛e™o si˛e z powietrza. O Josifie Brodskim z Zofi˛a Ratajczakow˛a rozmawia Jerzy Illg,’’ in Reszty nie trzeba (1963): 11. 23. Tosza, Stan serca, 28. 24. As can be seen on the tape of the TV program ‘‘With Brodsky at Dusk’’ (Z Brodskim o zmierzchu), edited by Andrzej Drawicz. Woroszylski did not attend this event, as he was sick. He died in 1996. D˛abrowski was no longer alive. Drawicz died in 1997. 25. From Bo™otowa and Szymak-Reiferowa interview in Przekrój, July 4, 1993. The newspaper Brodsky cited was undoubtedly the New York Review of Books (March 17, 1983) and the poem would have appeared in English, as Baranczak’s ´ Polish translation appeared in Zeszyty literackie in the summer of 1983, when, I believe, both writers were already free. Perhaps, however, Baranczak’s ´ translation was published in a Polish under-

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Under the Influence? Joseph Brodsky and Poland ground newspaper, but I was unable to find any proof of this. It may have simply been a computer-typed version. 26. ‘‘Conversation with Joseph Brodsky,’’ in Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad, ed. John Glad (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 102–13; quote at 109. 27. Husarska, ‘‘A Talk with Joseph Brodsky’’; and Adelgeim, ‘‘ ‘Rasshirenie rechii,’ ’’ 145. 28. Tomas Venclova, ‘‘Josifo Brodskio Atminimui,’’ in Josifas Brodskis. Vaizdas i jura (Vilnius: Vyturys, 1999), 355–62; quote at 357. Venclova believes that, for Brodsky, Lithuania had the same importance as Georgia had for Pasternak and Armenia for Mandelshtam (359). 29. Katowice speech, unpublished; original in English. 30. ‘‘On Both Sides of the Ocean’’; Adam Michnik speaks with Joseph Brodsky, in ‘‘Magazyn,’’ Gazeta Wyborcza, January 20, 1995. Unpublished translation by Jane Cave. 31. Personal communication, New York, 1997. 32. See Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (New York: Holt, 1991), with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky. 33. In 1964, Anna Akhmatova received three of Wis™awa Szymborska’s poems for translation. One of the poems she translated herself, and the other two she gave to her then otherwise unemployed secretary, Anatoly Nayman, to translate. The three translated poems appeared in Pol’sha (May 1964), all three signed by Akhmatova. See Szcz˛esna and Bikont, Pamiatkowe ˛ rupiecie, 217. 34. In a letter from Ann Kjellberg, September 17, 2000. 35. Tosza, Stan serca, 161. Brodsky had enormous respect and genuine admiration for the great Lithuanian Pole, but neither poet made any literary concessions to the other. Mi™osz considered Russian iamb dangerous to his own writing, and Brodsky was not attracted to Mi™osz’s vers libre. The relation was, to say the least, uneven: whereas the Polish language accommodates the sing-song (za´spiew) aspect of Russian, and there are poets who wrote in that style of language (for example, Tuwim and Le´smian), serving as a warning to Mi™osz who did not want to succumb to that style, Russian is immune to Polish metric influence and Brodsky had nothing to fear. In a gesture of friendship Mi™osz translated one of Brodsky’s poems, while Brodsky translated six of Mi™osz’s. 36. Brodsky, ‘‘To Please a Shadow,’’ 365. 37. See Glad, Conversations in Exile, 112–13. 38. Joseph Brodsky, ‘‘Uncommon Visage: The Nobel Lecture,’’ in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995), 44–58; quotes at 44 and 55. 39. In this way Adelgeim characterized the influence of Polish culture on Brodsky (‘‘ ‘Rasshirenie rechii,’ ’’ 152). Brodsky used the expression ‘‘to enlarge his diction’’ while writing about Auden. 40. Tosza, Stan serca, 7. 41. Brodsky also enjoyed many ‘‘friendships manqué’’ with Poles. The eminent émigré writer Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski ´ met Joseph Brodsky at a dinner in Rome right after the imposition of martial law in Poland. ‘‘The dinner was a total fiasco,’’ Herling-Grudzinski ´ later wrote, ‘‘and even ended in a quarrel. . . . It was the matter of martial law. To my taste, Brodsky spoke about it sometimes with too much overly Russian understanding. . . . But maybe I gave in to provocation? This suspicion does not

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Irena Grudzinska-Gross ´ leave me in peace whenever I remember that evening in Trastevere’’ (Gustaw HerlingGrudzinski, ´ Dziennik pisany noca, ˛ 1997–1999 [Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2000], 38). 42. Venclova had told Brodsky about Mi™osz in 1972, on their last meeting before Brodsky left Russia (Venclova, ‘‘Rozmowa z Tomasem Venclov˛a,’’ 152). 43. And Poles were not real foreigners. To a question as to why foreign men occupied such a large part in Anna Akhmatova’s life, Józef Czapski, for example, Brodsky replied: ‘‘What kind of foreigners are they! Czapski was a Pole, of Slavic culture. What kind of foreigner was he to a Russian poet!’’ (Solomon Volkov, ‘‘Remembering Anna Akhmatova,’’ a conversation with Joseph Brodsky, Zeszyty literackie, no. 30 [1990]). 44. ‘‘On Both Sides of the Ocean.’’ Adam Michnik speaks with Joseph Brodsky. 45. George F. Kennan, ‘‘Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany (May 1945),’’ in idem, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 532–46; quotes at 534–35.

204

selected readings

´ Brus, Anna, El˙zbieta Kaczynska, ´ and Wiktoria Sliwowska, eds. Zes™anie i katorga na Syberii w dziejach Polaków, 1815–1914 (Exile and penal servitude in Siberia in Poles’ history, 1815–1914). Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1992. Folejewski, Zbigniew. Studies in Russian and Polish Literature: In Honor of Wac™aw Lednicki. The Hague: Mouton, 1962. Galster, Bohdan, ed., with the cooperation of Izabela Jarosinska. ´ Tradycja i wspó™czesno´sc´ . Powinowactwa literackie polsko-rosyjskie (Tradition and contemporaneity: Polish-Russian literary affinities). Wroc™aw: Zak™ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 1978. Galster, Bohdan, and Krystyna Sierocka, eds., with the cooperation of Aniela Piorunowa. Po obu stronach granicy. Z powiaza ˛ n´ kulturalnych polsko-radzieckich w XXleciu mi˛edzywojennym (On both sides of the border: Cultural Polish-Soviet connections during the interwar period). Wroc™aw: Zak™ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 1972. Galster, Bohdan, and Janina Kamionkowa, eds., with the cooperation of Aniela Piorunowa. Spotkania literackie. Z dziejów powiaza ˛ n´ polsko-rosyjskich w dobie romantyzmu i neoromantyzmu (Literary encounters: from the history of Polish-Russian connections during Romanticism and neo-Romanticism). Wroc™aw: Zak™ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 1973. Galster, Bohdan, Janina Kamionkowa, and Krystyna Sierocka, eds., with the cooperation of Aniela Piorunowa. Pisarze i krytycy. Z recepcji nowo˙zytnej literatury rosyjskiej w Polsce (Writers and critics: From the reception of modern Russian literature in Poland). Wroc™aw: Zak™ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 1975. ————. Zwierciad™o prasy. Czasopisma polskie XIX wieku o literaturze rosyjskiej (The mirror of the press: Polish nineteenth-century periodicals on Russian literature). Wroc™aw: Zak™ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 1978. Goscilo, Helena, trans. and ed. Russian and Polish Women’s Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. Geyer, Dietrich. Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914. Translated by Bruce Little. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Grudzinska-Gross, ´ Irena. Pi˛etno rewolucji. Custine, Tocqueville, Mickiewicz i wyobra´znia romantyczna (The scar of revolution: Custine, Tocqueville, Mickiewicz and the Romantic imagination). Translated by Bozena Shallcross. 2nd ed. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000 [1994]. Holmgren, Beth. Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

205

Selected Readings Hosking, Geoffrey A. Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917. London: Harper Collins, 1997. Janion, Maria, and Ryszard Przybylski. Sprawa Stawrogina (The question of Stavrogin). Afterword by Tadeusz Komendant. Warsaw: SiC!, 1996. Kappeler, Andreas. The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Translated by Alfred Clayton. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2001. ´ Ko™akowski, Tadeusz, Józef Magnuszewski, and René Sliwowski, eds. W kr˛egu tradycji i wspó™czesno´sci literatur s™owianskich ´ (Within tradition and contemporaneity of Slavic literatures). Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1982. Kushakov, A. V. Pushkin i Pol’sha. Tula: Priokskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo, 1990. Lanoux, Andrea. Od narodu do kanonu. Powstawanie kanonow polskiego i rosyjskiego romantyzmu w latach 1915–1865 (From the nation to the canon. The formation of the Polish and Russian literary canons in the years 1815 to 1865). Translated by Krasowska Malgorzata. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2003. Lazari, Andrzej de. Dusza polska i rosyjska. Od Adama Mickiewicza i Aleksandra Puszkina do Czes™awa Mi™osza i Aleksandra So™˙zenicyna. Materia™y do ‘‘katalogu’’ wzajemnych uprzedzen´ Polaków i Rosjan (Polish and Russian souls. From Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin to Czes™aw Mi™osz and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Materials for the ‘‘Catalog’’ of Poles and Russians’ mutual biases). Warsaw: Polski Instytut Spraw Mi˛edzynarodowych, 2004. LeDonne, John. The Russian Empire and the World: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lednicki, Wac™aw. Pouchkine et la Pologne. À propos de la trilogie antipolonaise de Pouchkine. Paris: E. Leroux, 1928. ————. Przyjaciele Moskale (Muscovite friends). Cracow: Gebethner i Wolff, 1935. ————. Russian-Polish Relations, Their Historical, Cultural and Political Background. Chicago: Polish National Alliance Educational Department, 1944. ————. Russia, Poland and the West: Essays in Literary and Cultural History. New York: Roy, 1954. ————. Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe, Turgenev and Sienkiewicz. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956. ————. Glossy Krasinskiego ´ do apologetyki rosyjskiej (Krasinski’s ´ glosses to Russian apologetics). Paris: Bibioteka ‘‘Kultury,’’ 1959. ————. Rosyjsko-polska entente cordiale, jej poczatki ˛ i fundamenty 1903–1905 (RussianPolish entente cordiale, its origins and foundations 1903–1905). Paris: Biblioteka ‘‘Kultury,’’ 1966. Miliukov, P. N. Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury. Vol. 3, Natsionalizm i obshchestvennoe mnenie, 2 parts. St. Petersburg: Skorokhodov, 1901, Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, 1913. Nolde, Boris. La Formation de l’Empire russe. Études, notes et documents. 2 vols. Paris: Institute d’études slaves, 1952–53. Shallcross, Bo˙zena. Through the Poet’s Eye: Journeys of Zagajewski, Herbert and Brodsky. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003. ´ Sliwowska, Wiktoria, ed. Zwiazki ˛ rewolucjonistów polskich i rosyjskich w XIX wieku. Materia™y sesji naukowej, Poznan, ´ 12–14 listopada 1970. (Relations between Polish and Russian revolutionaries. Proceedings of a conference in Poznan, ´ November 12–14 1970). Gdansk: ´ Zak™ad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, ´ 1972.

206

Selected Readings Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Subtelny, Orest. Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. ´ Swidzi nski, ´ Jerzy, ed. Mickiewicz-Puszkin. Materia™y z´ ród™owe i bibliograficzne (Mickiewicz-Pushkin. Source materials and bibliographies). Introduction by Galster Bohdan. Poznan: ´ Wydawnictwo Poznanskiego ´ Towarzystwa Przyjació™ Nauk, 1991. ————, ed. Ze studiów nad literatura˛ rosyjska˛ i polska. ˛ Ksi˛ega po´swi˛econa pami˛eci profesora Bohdana Galstera (Studies on Russian and Polish literatures. Festschrift in memory of Professor Bohdan Galster). Introduction by Galster Bohdan. Poznan: ´ Wydawnictwo Poznanskiego ´ Towarzystwa Przyjació™ Nauk, 1999. Tolz, Vera. Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Walicki, Andrzej. Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies in Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Age. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1991. Wandycz, Piotr S. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984. Weeks, Theodore. Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Zielinska, ´ Marta. Polacy, Rosjanie, romantyzm (Poles, Russians, and Romanticism). Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL, 1998.

207

contributors

MANON DE COURTEN holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she now teaches in the Department of Philosophy. Philosophy of history and the intellectual history of Russia are her primary research interests. MEGAN DIXON is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Oregon. HALINA GOLDBERG is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Indiana University. She is editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004) and author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (forthcoming). LEONID EFREMOVICH GORIZONTOV is a doctor of historical sciences and head of the Department of the Eastern Slavs in the Institute of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. ´ IRENA GRUDZINSKA-GROSS is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Director of the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University. BETH HOLMGREN is Professor and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is editor of The Russian Memoir: History and Literature. JUDITH DEUTSCH KORNBLATT is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her publications include The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature; Russian Religious Thought (coedited with Richard Gustafson); and Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Russian Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church. MATTHEW PAULY is a visiting scholar at the Center for European and Russian Studies, Michigan State University, and lecturer at James Madison College.

209

Contributors NINA PERLINA is Professor of Russian, Indiana University. Her recent publications include Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (with Cynthia Simmons), and Ol’ga Freidenberg’s Works and Days. ROBERT PRZYGRODZKI is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northern Illinois University. DAVID L. RANSEL is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History and Director of the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University. His major monographs include The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party; Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia; and Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria. BOZENA SHALLCROSS is Associate Professor of Polish Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago. She is author of Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky and editor of Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self. BARBARA SKINNER is Assistant Professor of History at Adelphi University. ANDRZEJ WALICKI is the O’Neill Family Professor Emeritus of History at Notre Dame University. His principal works in English include The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists; The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in NineteenthCentury Russian Thought; A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism; Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland; Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism; Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of ‘‘Western Marxism’’; The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko; Russia, Poland, and Universal Regeneration: Studies on Russian and Polish Thought of the Romantic Epoch; and Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia.

210

Index

aggression of Poland, 4–5, 6, 15–16, 173 Akhmatova, Anna, 194, 196, 198, 199 Aksakov, Ivan: and geopolitical boundaries, 135, 136 journal, 113 on Kingdom of Poland, 126–127 philosophical evolution of, 11 Slavophilism of, 94–98 Aleksii II, 20–21 Alexander I: and cultural trends, 78 and Durova, 39 and geopolitical boundaries, 139 and Kingdom of Poland, 7 and liberalization, 10 pro-Polish policy of, 96 and Staszic Palace, 151, 155–156 Alexander II, 83, 121, 126, 127, 132 Alexander III, 110, 121, 148, 154, 156 Anderson, Benedict: on influence of music, 84 on national biographies, 145–146 nationalistic emphasis of, 61 on print and national identity, 51, 53 on Russification, 68 on unisonality, 80–81 Annenkov, Pavel, 73 ‘‘The Anniversary of Borodino’’ (Pushkin), 50, 56, 59, 60–61, 67 Antonov-Ovseenko, Vladimir, 181, 182–183 Apolek (literary character), 163, 166, 167, 169, 171 Apukhtin, Aleksandr L., 147–148, 152, 154, 156 Arakcheev, Aleksei, 86 Archaeographic Commission, 76 architecture, 14, 144–157 aristocracy. See gentry and aristocracy assimilation, 3–4 Auden, W. H., 198, 199

Augustus gubernia, 129 autocracy, 76, 146 Avejde, O., 128 Avins, Carol, 161 Babel, Isaac, 15, 160–170 Balakirev, Milii Alekseevich, 74, 82 Bal’mont, Konstantin, 15 Baran’czak, Stanisl’aw, 195, 199–200 Baratynskii, Evgenii, 7 Bathory, Stephan, 23 Beck, Jozef, 180, 182–183 ‘‘Before the Sacred Tomb’’ (Pushkin), 50, 57– 58 Belarus/Belorussia: assimilation, 3 and bids for independence, 125 and Catholicism, 21–31, 97 geopolitical boundaries, 131, 137, 139, 140, 167, 173, 175 Polish influence in, 91, 99, 129 and Russification, 133 and Soviet Union, 184 Benckendorf, Aleksandr Khristoforovich, 63, 64, 72 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 65 Bessarabia, Territory of, 136 Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Aleksandr, 7 Bethea, David, 50–51, 52, 53, 54–55 Betskoi, Ivan, 8 Bhabha, Homi, 53 Bial’ystok, 129 Bibikov, Dmitrii, 132 Bludov, Dmitrii, 126, 134–135 Bolshevik Party, 174 borders and borderlands, 1–2, 15, 124. See also geopolitics Boris Godunov (Pushkin), 62 Borodin, Aleksandr Porfirevich, 74 Brandenberger, David, 174–175, 176

211

Index Britain, 175, 176 Brodsky, Joseph, 16–17, 189–201 Brodzin’ski, Kazimierz, 77 Broniewski, Wladyslaw, 15 Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 104, 109 Bug River, 127 Bulgarin, F. V., 125 Bunge, Nikolai, 136 Byzantium, 22 Catherine II (Catherine the Great), 6–7, 10, 25, 26–28, 34, 35 Catholicism: campaign against clergy, 93 and cultural reforms, 114 Dostoevsky on, 102–103, 109 and Eastern Orthodoxy, 3, 20–31, 110–117 and ethnicity, 112 Herzen on, 12 and Judaism, 97 and language, 97, 99 and Poland, 80, 92, 94, 95, 97–98, 105 as threat to Russian identity, 3, 146 and uprising of 1863, 100 censorship, 64, 78, 110 Central Committee of the KP(b)U, 172, 174, 177, 183, 184, 185 Chaadaev, Petr, 4, 10, 90, 126 Chernigov gubernia, 131 Chernov, Ivan, 41 Cherven cities, 125 Chicherin, Boris, 115 Chicherin, Georgii, 175, 177 children, 8–9, 14, 146–147, 151, 154, 156 China, 175 Chopin, Frédéric-François, 75, 82, 83, 88 classes. See also gentry and aristocracy; peasantry: class conflict, 16 in Dostoevsky’s writings, 103–104 and ethnicity, 128 and Glinka’s opera, 79 of illegitimate children, 8–9 Communist Party, 172, 173, 177, 181 conservative nationalism, 115 Constantinople, 21, 22, 32, 109 ‘‘Conversation about Criticism’’ (Pushkin), 66 Copernicus, Nicholas, 145, 149 Corazzi, Antonio, 145 Cossacks, 24, 130–131, 134, 161 Counter Reformation, 7

212

Courland gubernia, 136 Craft-Fairchild, Catherine, 47, 48 cross-dressing, 37–48 Cui, César Antonovich, 74 culture: Brodsky’s interest in, 196 cultural borrowing, 6 cultural mediator role of Poland, 6, 192 fears of Western penetration, 14 Herzen on, 12 interest in Polish culture, 14–15 in Kingdom of Poland, 7 and Lithuania, 96 reforms, 114 and religion, 2–3, 28, 29–30, 116 and Russian identity, 1, 6–7 significance to Poland, 4–5 suppression of Polish culture, 11 Ukrainian cultural identity, 31, 176–177 Western culture, 192, 194 world culture, 190–191, 192 Curson Line, 168 Czacki, Tadeusz, 96 Czartoryski, Adam, 77, 96 Dabrowski, Witold, 195, 199 dance, 10–11, 74, 75, 81, 83, 84 Danilevskii, Nikolai, 3 Decembrist rebellion (1825), 8, 197 De Courten, Manon, 5, 13, 110–117 Delavigne, Jean-François-Casimir, 65 Del’vig, Anton Antonovich, 49 Denikin, Anton, 174 Derzhavin, Felix, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58 Diary of a Writer (Dostoevsky), 101, 103, 104, 106 Dixon, Megan, 9–10, 49–67 Dmowski, Roman, 127 Dnepr river, 131 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 12–13, 67, 91–92, 100– 109, 197 Drawicz, Andrzej, 193, 194–195, 196, 199 Durnovo, I. S., 115–116, 120, 121 Durova, Nadezhda, 8, 37–47, 103 Dvina river, 131 Eastern Orthodoxy: and Catholicism, 3, 20–31, 110–117 and Counter Reformation, 7 and education, 154 and ethnicity, 106 and geopolitical boundaries, 133

Index and Official Nationality, 76 and Russianness, 146 and Slavophilism, 78 and uprising of 1863, 100 ‘‘Echo’’ (Pushkin), 52 economy, 116 Eliza (literary character), 160, 161, 165, 166, 169 Elsner, Józef, 83 Emerson, Caryl, 62 England, 175, 176 Enlightenment era, 10 ethnicity: Aksakov on, 95 in Dostoevsky’s writings, 102 ethnic nationalism, 3 and geopolitical boundaries, 134 non-Russian ethnic groups, 3–4 and religion, 106, 112 and social strata, 128 Fedotov, Georgii, 62, 69 Fennell, John, 32 First Boys’ Gymnasium, 145, 147–148, 154, 156 Fomin, Evstignei Ipat’evich, 76 Fonvizin, Denis, 6 France, 180 Frantsev, V. A., 71, 73, 133 Freyer, August, 82 Frizman, L., 71 ‘‘From Notes to A. O. Rosseti’’ (Pushkin), 67 ‘‘From you I learned of the fall of Warsaw’’ (Pushkin), 64–65 Frost, Robert, 199 Gal’czynski, Konstanty Ildefons, 191, 192, 193 Galicia, 126, 130, 164, 167, 169, 174 gentry and aristocracy: Aksakov on, 96 class conflict, 16 and culture, 3 and ethnicity, 128 and geopolitics, 130, 138 and Glinka’s opera, 77, 79 illegitimate children of, 8–9 and Latinity, 112 power of, 121 Pushkin on, 52–53 and uprising of 1863, 92 geopolitics, 122–141;

boundaries, 1–2, 123–130, 167, 168 political strategies, 130–140, 173, 175 Germany, 180–181, 184 Glinka, Mikhail, 10–11, 54, 66, 74–84 Glinka, Sergei, 79, 129 Godunov, Boris Fedorovich, 59 Gogol, Nikolai, 8 Goldberg, Halina, 10–11, 74–84 Golitsyn, Lev, 82 Golitsyn, Nikolai Borisovich 50, 64, 65 Golitsyn, Sergei, 82 Gorbanevskaia, Natalia, 194 Gorianchikov, Aleksandr Petrovich (fictional character), 101–103, 104, 105–106, 108, 109 Göring, Hermann, 181 Gorizontov, Leonid, 13–14, 122–141 Great Britain, 175, 176 Great Poland, 125 Greek Catholic Church (Uniate Church), 7, 20–31, 33, 35, 133, 139 Greenleaf, Monika, 65 Gringmut, Vladimir, 116 Grochowiak, Stanisl’aw, 192, 193 Grodetskii, Sergei, 87 Grodno gubernia, 132 Grudzinska-Gross, Irena, 6, 16–17, 189–201 Gutsche, George, 47 Harasymowicz, Jerzy, 192, 193 Haxthausen, August von, 12 Heldt, Barbara, 39 Helfant, Ian, 66 Herbert, Zbigniew, 193, 197, 199 Herzen, Aleksandr, 12, 71, 87–88, 90, 93, 118 Hilferding, A. F., 127 history of region, 6–17 Hitler, Adolf, 180–181, 183 Holmgren, Beth, 5, 8, 37–47 Hosking, Geoffrey, 69 Hussitism, 92 Iaroslavl’ gubernia, 123 Iefremov, Serhii, 178, 179 Ilovaiskii, Dmitrii, 115, 120 Imeretinskii, Alexander, 154 independence, 200–201 individualism, 112 intermarriage, 14, 146, 154, 156 Issatschenko, A. V., 192 Ivan IV (the Terrible), 23

213

Index Jesuits, 93 Jews and Judaism: autonomy of, 2 in Babel’s writings, 15, 161, 162–167 and Catholicism, 97 in Durova’s writings, 48 and geopolitical boundaries, 139–140 influence of, 133 Jewish question, 137–138 in Polish population, 3 Russians’ fears of, 14 Solov’ëv on, 115 in Warsaw, 126 John Paul II, 20–21, 30 Kaluga gubernia, 123, 127 Kankrin, Egor, 131–132, 138 Kaplica Moskiewska (Muscovite chapel), 152 Kappeler, Andreas, 129, 130 Kapuscinska, Zofia, 192–193, 198 Karamzin, Nicholas, 6, 155, 158 Kareev, Nikolai, 114, 115 Kastrioto-Skanderbek, Vladimir, 81 Katkov, Mikhail, 89–90, 93, 99, 115, 137, 146 Kazhinskii, Viktor, 81 Keep, John L., 47–48 Kennan, George F., 201 Khar’kov gubernia, 131, 132 Khitrovo, Elizaveta, 72 Khitrovo, Sofia, 62, 63 Khmelnytskii, Hetman Bohdan, 24 Kholm district, 129, 133–134, 136 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 80, 90, 92, 120 Khvostov, D. I., 6 Khvylia, Andrii, 181–182 Kieniewicz, Stefan, 126, 129 Kiev gubernia, 129, 133, 134, 135 Kingdom of Poland, 7, 125–128, 129, 135, 136 Kireevskii, Ivan, 78, 80, 90, 119 Kiukhel’beker, Vil’gel’m, 54, 66 Kjellberg, Ann, 198 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii, 3 Kochanowski, Jan, 6 Koniski, Georgii, 35 Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, 15, 160–170 Kos’ciuszko, Tadeusz, 56, 96 Kosior, Stanislav, 183 Kostroma gubernia, 123 Kovno gubernia, 132 Kozl’owski, Józef, 83 Kraków, 126

214

Kruczkowski, Leon, 15 Kulle, V., 193 Kuromiya, Hiroaki, 178 Kurpin’ski, Karol, 76, 82, 83 Kursk gubernia, 123 Kushakov, A. V., 52–53, 67, 70 Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich, 58 Lady of Cze,stochowa (icon), 111 language: Aksakov on, 95 and Catholicism, 97, 99 and cultural reforms, 114 in education, 147 and geopolitical boundaries, 1–2 and identity, 3, 4–5, 84 in Kingdom of Poland, 7 preservation of, 6 translations of, 190–191, 192 vernacularization of, 84 Lanskoi, Sergei, 132, 135 Latinism, 91, 93, 112 Lednicki, Waclaw, 51, 61, 71–72 LeDonne, John, 122 Lemyk, Mykola, 182 Leskov, Nikolai, 18 Levitsky, Alexander, 66 liberals, 111, 113–115, 117 A Life for the Tsar (Glinka), 74–81, 82, 84 literature. See also other specific writers; poetry: of Babel, 160–170 commonalities in, 4–5, 13 distribution of, 16–17 of Dostoevsky, 100–108 influence of, 6, 14–15 interest in, 8 of Romantic era, 7–8 translations of, 190–191, 192 Lithuania and Lithuanians. See also PolishLithuanian Commonwealth: Aksakov on, 94 Brodsky’s interest in, 192, 197, 198 and Catholicism, 21, 22–23 culture of, 96 and geopolitical boundaries, 139, 173, 175 in Napoleonic wars, 38 nationalism of, 89 and Poland, 6, 125, 129–130, 139 and Russification, 133 and Soviet Union, 184 Little Poland, 125 Little Russia, 128–129, 130, 134, 136

Index Litvinov, Maksim, 175–176, 179, 180–181, 183 Liutov (literary character), 160–161, 163, 165, 166, 169, 171 Lizarev, A. S., 177 Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilevich, 52, 55, 58 Lotman, Yuri, 73 Ludomirski (literary character), 161, 163, 169 Lvov, Aleksandrovich, 76, 85 Magnitskii, Mikhail, 86 Maksymovych, Karlo, 177 Mandelshtam, Osip, 190, 196, 198, 199 marriage, 14, 146, 154, 156 ‘‘A Martial Law Carol’’ (Brodsky), 198 Mazowia, 125 mazurkas, 74, 75, 81, 83, 84 Meyer, Alfred, 176 Mickiewicz, Adam: Aksakov on, 96 on European civilization, 92 and Glinka, 81, 82 influence of Russia on, 65–66 on Poland, 111 and Pushkin, 8, 9, 50, 62–63 Russian interest in, 15 and Slavophilism, 77, 87 Mikhailovich, Aleksei, 24 Miliutin, Nikolai, 93 Mil’osz, Czesl’aw, 198, 199–200, 203 Minsk gubernia, 132, 135 Mogilev gubernia, 129, 131–132 Moniuszko, Stanisl’aw, 81 Mordva, 2 Moscow, 123, 126, 139 Murav’eva, Olga, 52, 53 Muscovite Church, 22–24 Muscovy, 21, 23, 32 music, 10–11, 74–84, 192 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich, 74 Napoleon I, 11, 18, 38, 56 Napoleonic wars, 37–47 nationalism. See also patriotism: Aksakov on, 97 conservative nationalism, 115 of Dostoevsky, 106 in Glinka’s opera, 77 and language, 84 of Lithuania, 89 of Nicholas I’s regime, 78 and Official Nationality, 76

and poetry of Polish uprising, 67, 69 of Poland, 3 of Russia, 29, 89–90, 173, 174–175 Nayman, Anatoly, 197–198 Nazis, 180 Nevskii, Alexander, 22, 153 New Russia gubernia, 136 Nicholas I: and geopolitical boundaries, 131 and Glinka’s opera, 76 nationalism of, 78 and Official Nationality, 10, 28–29 and Polish immigration, 136 and Pushkin’s poetry, 50 and reforms, 138 Nicholas II, 153–154 Nicholas II Polytechnic Institute, 149 Nizhnii Novgorod gubernia, 123 nobility. See gentry and aristocracy Norwid, Cyprian Kamil, 192, 193 Notes from the House of the Dead (Dostoevsky), 100–108 Odoevskii, Vladimir Fedorovich, 78–79, 86 Official Nationality, 10, 28–29, 76, 77, 78, 85 Ogin’ski, Michal’ Kleofas, 81, 83 Omsk prison, 100–108 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), 179–180, 184, 185 Orlov gubernia, 123 Ostoja, T., 133 Ostsee Region, 135, 136 Other (theme), 4, 11, 12, 103, 104 Pale of Settlement, 139 Pan-Slavism, 11, 106 pany. See gentry and aristocracy Paskevich, Ivan Fedorovich, 56 Pasternak, Boris, 190 patriotism. See also nationalism: Aksakov on, 97 and poetry of Polish uprising, 61–62, 67, 68–69, 73 of Poland, 94 in polonaises, 83 of Russia, 8, 52, 61–62, 96 of Soviet Union, 173, 174–175, 176, 179 Pauly, Matthew, 16, 172–185 peasantry: and ethnicity, 128 and geopolitics, 137–138 and Glinka’s opera, 77, 79

215

Index peasantry (continued) of Lithuania, 89 and music, 79, 82 national identity of, 11–12 and occupation of Poland, 121 Pogodin on, 86 and social Caesarism, 93 and uprising of 1863, 96–97 and Western Ukrainian Communist Party, 177 Penza gubernia, 123 Perlina, Nina, 12–13, 100–108 Peter I (Peter the Great), 10, 25, 35 Petliura, Symon, 174, 178 Pil’sudski, Józef, 130, 168, 173–179, 182, 184, 186 Pinsky, Robert, 68 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 29–30, 115, 136 Podolsk gubernia, 135 poetry. See also literature: of Brodsky, 189–201 of Kochanowski, 6 of Pushkin, 8, 9, 49–67 of Slowacki, 15 Pogodin, Aleksandr, 15 Pogodin, Mikhail, 71, 78, 86 Pogosian, Elena, 56 Pokrovskii, Vladimir, 148 Polesie, 125 ‘‘The Polish Catechism,’’ 93 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: attempts to restore, 89 and Catholicism, 21, 23, 25 and geopolitical boundaries, 123, 125–126, 128, 135, 139 Polish question, 89–98, 110–117, 139 Polish-Soviet War of 1920, 173–175 ‘‘Polonaise: Variation’’ (Brodsky), 198 polonaises, 74, 75, 81, 83, 84 Polonism, 112, 140 Polonization, 91, 146–147, 151 Polonophilia, 5 Polonophobia, 5, 16, 172–185 Poltava gubernia, 131 Postyshev, Pavel, 181, 183 Potemkin, Grigorii, 8, 129, 130 Poznan’, 126 Prach, Ivan, 76, 85 Praga, 59 prisoners, 100–108 Prokhov, A., 148, 152 Prokopovich, Feofan, 35

216

‘‘The Prophet’’ (Pushkin), 54, 66 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 94 Przygrodzki, Robert, 14, 144–157 Pskov gubernia, 136 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 49–67; contemporary reactions, 61–65 context of poetry, 53–56 and Glinka, 82 and Mickiewicz, 8, 9, 50, 62–63 on Poland, 9–10 Putin, Vladimir, 20 Radek, Karl, 181, 186 Raevskaia, Maria, 55 Ram, Harsha, 56, 69–70 Ratajczakowa, Zofia, 192–193, 202 rebellions, 3 ‘‘Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo’’ (Pushkin), 60 reforms, 114, 115, 138, 139 Rej, Mikol’aj, 193 religion. See also Catholicism; Eastern Orthodoxy: and boundaries of identity, 1–2 and Counter Reformation, 7 and culture, 2–3, 28, 29–30, 116 and ethnicity, 106, 112 and nationalism, 77 religious tolerance, 111, 115, 133 reunion between churches, 110–117 and Russification, 116 schism between churches, 20–31 Repnin, N. G., 130–131 Riazan’ gubernia, 123 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreevich, 74 Robacki (literary character), 167 Rogachev city, 132 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Romanov, Mikhail Fedorovich, 75, 84, 154 Romanov family, 76 Romuald (literary character), 161 Rosenberg, Alfred, 181 Rosset, A. O., 64 Rozanov, Vasilii, 63 Rozen, Egor (Georg) Fedorovich, 77 Rus’, 21–22, 26, 32 Russian Nights (Odoevskii), 78–79 Russian Orthodox Church. See Eastern Orthodoxy Russification: Aksakov’s emphasis on, 95 Anderson on, 68

Index and geopolitics, 133 and interior gubernias, 125 and occupation of Poland, 117 Solov’ëv on, 111, 115–116 Ryleev, Kondratii, 8 Sadkovskii, Viktor (of Minsk), 26–27 Said, Edward, 4 St. Petersburg, 126, 130 Samarin, Iurii, 11, 90, 92–94, 112, 113, 119 Sazonov, Sergei, 127 Scriabin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 74 Semashko, Iosif, 126, 127 Serov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 87 sexuality, 41 Shcherbatov, Mikhail, 6 Shishkov, Aleksandr, 6 Shliapkin, I. A., 66 Shuiskii. See Vasilii Shuiskii Shumskii, Mikhail, 8 Shumskyi, Oleksandr, 176–177 Siberian tribespeople, 2 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 15 Sigismund III Vasa, 145, 151, 156, 158 Skinner, Barbara, 7, 20–31 Skrypnyk, Mykola, 173, 181–182, 183 Slavophilism, 10; and conservative nationalism, 115 and Glinka’s opera, 84 influence of, 77–81 and Mickiewicz, 77, 87 philosophical evolution of, 11 and Polish question, 89–98, 111–112 and Solov’ëv, 110, 117 Slowacki, Juliusz, 15 Smolensk gubernia, 123, 128–129, 131, 132, 136 Society of the Friends of Science, 145, 151 Society of Wisdom Lovers, 78 Soliva, Carlo, 81 Solov’ëv, Sergei, 3, 13 Solov’ëv, Vladimir, 13, 110–117 Soviet Trade Union Council, 175 Soviet Union, 16–17, 30, 172–185, 200–201 Spasovich, Vladimir, 114, 115 Stalin, Joseph, 16, 175, 176 ‘‘Stanzas’’ (Pushkin), 54 Starynkevich, Sokrates, 154, 158 Stasiulevich, Matvei, 113 Staszic, Stanisl’aw, 77, 145 Staszic Palace, 14, 144–157, 150, 155 Stefani, Jan, 76

Stefanovich, Andrei Leont’evich, 147, 148, 154 Stennik, Yuri, 56 stereotypes, 4, 13, 16, 147 Strakhov, Nikolai, 11, 91 Stresemann, Gustav, 175 Struve, Gleb, 66 Susanin, Ivan (fictional character), 10–12, 75, 79, 80 Suvorov, Aleksandr, 47–48, 56, 59, 70 Svedomskii, Pavel A., 149 Swartz, Anne, 88 Szyller, Stefan, 149 Szymanowska, Maria, 81, 87, 199 Tambov gubernia, 123 Taruskin, Richard, 76, 77 Tatars, 22, 23 Tchaikovsky, Petr Il’ich, 74, 80 Territory of Bessarabia, 136 terrorism, 179–180 Time of Troubles (1598–1613), 23 Titov, F. I., 30 ‘‘To Count Olizar’’ (Pushkin), 55, 65 Tokarzewski, Szymon, 12, 103–106, 108, 109 ‘‘To My Friends’’ (Pushkin), 54 Torunczyk, Barbara, 200 ‘‘To the Calumniators of Russia’’ (Pushkin), 50, 56, 58–60 transvestitism, 37–48 Trotsky, Leon, 175 Tsvetaev, Dmitrii, 148, 152 Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna, 199 Tula gubernia, 123, 127 Turgenev, Aleksandr, 61–62, 71 Tuwim, Julian, 193 Tver’ gubernia, 123 Ukraine and Ukrainians: assimilation, 3 and bids for independence, 125 and geopolitical boundaries, 2, 139, 140, 167, 173, 175 John Paul II’s visit to, 20–21 national culture, 31, 176–177 and Poland, 91, 130, 137, 186 Russification of, 133 and Soviet Union, 16, 172, 173, 177–180, 181–182, 183–184 Ukrainophilia, 131 and Uniate Church, 21–31 Uniate Church (Greek Catholic Church), 7, 20–31, 33, 35, 133, 139

217

Index Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, 173, 178 Union of Brest (1596), 23–24, 29 Union of Lublin (1569), 6 United Kingdom, 175, 176 ‘‘universal responsiveness,’’ 50, 67 University of Wilno, 96 uprisings: of 1830–1831, 8–9, 18, 49–67, 68–69, 77, 126 of 1863–1864, 89, 92, 93, 96–97, 100, 118, 129 Uvarov, Sergei, 51, 53, 63–64, 76 Vasilii Shuiskii, 145, 149–156, 158 Venclova, Tomas, 190, 191, 196 Venevitinov, Dmitrii, 54 Vestorovskii, Aleksei, 83 Viazemskii, Petr, 8, 61–62, 63, 65, 71, 72 Vielgorskii, Mikhail, 75 Vigel’, Filipp, 128 Vil’no gubernia, 129, 132, 135 Vistula, 125, 133 Vitebsk gubernia, 129, 131–132 Vladimir gubernia, 123 Voikov, Petr, 175, 176 Volkov, L., 137 Vologda gubernia, 123 Volynsk gubernia, 132–133 Voronezh gubernia, 123

218

Wajda, Andrzej, 192 Walicki, Andrzej, 89–98, 113 Warsaw, 125, 126, 127, 128, 135, 144–157 Warsaw Scientific Society, 149 Wasilewska, Wanda, 15 Western Ukrainian Communist Party (KPZU), 177 Whittaker, Cynthia, 70 ‘‘With Enlightenment You Illumined Your Reason’’ (Pushkin), 67 world culture, 190–191, 192 World War I, 167–168 World War II, 191–192 Woroszylski, Wiktor, 66, 68–69, 195, 199 xenophobia, 109, 137 Zagajewski, Adam, 199–200 Zaj˛aczek, Józef, 151 Zaleski, August, 179 Zaleskii, V., 138 Zhukovskii, Vasilii Andreevich, 8, 50, 71, 77, 78 Zirin, Mary, 39 Zizanii, Stefan, 33 ˙ Zochowski, Józef, 106–107 ˙ Zól’kiewski, Stanisl’aw, 151 Zygmunt III Waza, 145, 151, 156, 158